The Black Donnellys
Hard to believe, but there may be a new show this year even better than Friday Night Lights. I just happened upon the first episode of NBC's The Black Donnellys Thursday night, and it was really great. Of course, maybe having never seen The Sopranos (lacking HBO as I do), I fail to recognize that this is so much old hat. But it sure seemed fresh to me.
On the surface, the story appears pretty simple: four "Black-Irish" brothers in NY--hot-headed, gimply-legged Jimmy, good kid Tommy, bad luck Kevin, and pretty boy Sean--struggle with each other and their neighborhood in a life of mid-level mob thuggery. So its the Sopranos, but younger, prettier, and Irish. Except that the whole story is told in flashback by a pathological liar, "Joey Ice Cream," a friend of the Donnellys who's being interrogated by the police. So, much like in The Usual Suspects (one of my all-time favorite movies), you never really know what to believe or who to trust. Paul Haggis, who created the show after winning back-to-back Oscars for producing Million Dollar Baby and Crash (he also wrote the screenplay for Letters from Iwo Jima), has said that the original title was The World According to Joey Ice Cream, but that NBC nixed it. The show's got some great twists and turns, alongside a dark sense of humor. Mrs. TMcD was similarly impressed. Also seriously stressed out. I've seen just one episode, and I'm hooked.
posted by tenaciousmcd @ 9:40 AM
2 Comments:
Very interesting – tmcd and I are reading things very differently this week. I started the pilot of the Black Donnellys and it seemd like such a string of tired cliches and caricatured characters, that I turned it off after the first 10 minutes. Maybe I need to go back and watch the full episode.
I do wonder what Sopranos viewers thought, becuase for me it was just a lame rip-off the Sopranos. But tmcd obviusly wouldn't see it like that.
And we agree that FNL is briliant, so there must be other factors at work.
Watch the WHOLE thing and then tell me what you think. And remember how difficult it is to do a good gangster drama on network TV. Have there been any?
Since Sopranos has no meaning to me, I'd compare BDs more to crime films I know: Usual Suspects; Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels; Goodfellas, etc. I think it stacks up pretty well for a one hour TV show--and a pilot, no less--that has to pack in a lot of quick character intros in between the action.
And I agree that FNL is brilliant. I've missed several episodes, but it does an exceptional job of capturing the charcters that populate a football crazy Texas town. It reminds me, in some ways, of a great 80s drama, I'll Fly Away.
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