Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week.

A few months ago, “Mayor of Kingstown” star Jeremy Renner suggested the show’s fifth season will be its last. But during a conversation to preview season four, streaming its premiere episode Oct. 26 on Paramount+, series co-creator, writer and star Hugh Dillon said that was a misquote.

“Season five will not be our last season,” he said, suggesting the show will run for at least six seasons. Paramount+ has not announced any plans beyond the show’s fourth season, but if the show gets renewed for a fifth season, it’s expected to resume filming locally in January.

Given Skydance’s new ownership of Paramount and that “Kingstown” ranks as the least watched show from executive producer Taylor Sheridan, how confident is Dillon that “Kingstown” will continue?

“I’m 1,000% confident,” he said in a phone interview late last month.

The new season begins in typical “Kingstown” happy-go-lucky fashion as a new-to-Kingstown crime boss, Frank Moses (Lennie James, “The Walking Dead”), drugs four Russians and lines them up one next to another with their heads on a train track rail just in time for an approaching diesel engine to decapitate them. Good times!

The mayor himself, Mike McLusky (Jeremy Renner), is beset by challenges on multiple fronts: His brother, Kyle (Taylor Handley), is headed to prison for shooting another cop (to protect an innocent civilian) and Mike worries Kyle will be targeted in prison. And then there’s the new prison warden, Nina Hobbs (Edie Falco, “The Sopranos”), who seems disinclined to play by Mike’s rules.

“Take care of my brother, Kyle, and I’ll take care of you,” Mike tells Hobbs.

“Give me an example of ‘taking care of me,’ ” Hobbs replies frostily. “This is my castle now and only I can lower the drawbridge. … Wherever I serve, violence reduces like a sauce.”

After season three took multiple characters off the board — Iris (Emma Laird), Milo (Aidan Gillen), possibly Callahan (Richard Blake) — season four feels like a reset, beginning with the introductions of Hobbs, Moses and a new corrections officer, Cindy Stephens (Laura Benanti).

“There’s a great subversiveness to [Moses] that we loved,” Dillon said of the new gangster, a Detroit staple who may be expanding his criminal empire to Kingstown, Mich. “I had known a guy who was a heroin dealer when I grew up and he’d never been caught. He sold heroin out of a computer store [and Moses is] one of these criminals that doesn’t have a giant arrest record, hasn’t done a lot of time. He’s smart enough to stay ahead and this is kind of that on steroids.”

Benanti’s new C.O. character was also inspired by a real-life prison guard Dillon met while scouting locations for season one in Kingston, Ontario. (The show filmed its first season in Canada before relocating to Pittsburgh for season two.)

“I met this guard outside the original Kingston prison that was being decommissioned, this slight woman who is a guard had come out the portico door and I had just talked to her briefly,” Dillon recalled. “[She] was the antithesis of what you’d expect — a big, burly prison guard — a very intelligent single mother.

“What I’ve learned from Taylor Sheridan is we tell the stories, we don’t construct them,” Dillon continued. “You try to pull threads of authenticity from where I’m from and grew up and build around that. This character seems of our world and she will organically cross paths with Mike and Kyle in a big way.”

Landing Falco for a series regular role is surely the biggest actor “get” for “Kingstown” to date.

“As a person, she just makes the work effortless,” Dillon said. “It’s fun to watch. She’s exciting as an actor. She’s got so much depth. I don’t want to say she’s the villain, but it’s not going to be an easy relationship [with Mike].”

As “Kingstown” continues to explore institutional decay, the cycle of violence and how it manifests generationally, Dillon said the show is “all about the intricacies of human emotion for our characters.”

And he remains thrilled to film the series in Pittsburgh.

“I just have such an affinity for Pittsburgh,” Dillon said. “We’ve been there for so long now, it feels like home and it feels like Kingston, where I’m from. You can hear the trains and the church bells ringing, the things that are subliminal in the background of the city itself. I really like the town.”

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