Players: Jonathan Tucker, Billy Lush, Thomas Guiry, Michael Stahl-David, Keith Nobbs, Olivia Wilde and Kirk Acevedo
Pitch: Mystic River meets The Godfather in this Paul Haggis-scripted crime-drama, which chronicles a family of working-class Irish-Americans in Hell’s Kitchen, New York and their involvement in organized crime.
Prognosis: If you’ve seen Mystic River, you’ve seen The Black Donnellys and that isn’t a bad thing. This 13-part series takes a well-worn genre, the American crime-family drama, and adds the same themes that made Mystic River so utterly compelling – the craving to achieve the American dream regardless of the costs, the often suffocating bonds of familial loyalty and the moral dilemma faced by a just protagonist.
Maybe it was Haggis’s working relationship with Mystic director Clint Eastwood (the pair collaborated on Million Dollar Baby, Flags Of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima) that inspired the similarities between the film and the series. But it’s Haggis’s deft script work and direction that really distinguishes The Black Donnellys (not only from Eastwood, but from other dramas currently on TV).
In Haggis’s hands, the drama explores the very real, very gritty world of organized crime, and dysfunctional family relationships for that matter, against the constant backdrop of a foreboding doom. From the moment that straight-laced brother Tommy Donnelly (Tucker) chooses to join his brothers in opposing the local mob boss, there’s a sense that this family is steering itself towards destruction. Haggis’s references to the 19th century Black Donnellys, a small-town Ontario family of Irish origin, who were massacred by the townspeople over a feud, only adds to this sense.
If the Donnelly’s self-destruction is in fact the impetus of the show, the only questions that remain are how, when and who will be redeemed. It’s these questions that make this crime-drama worth watching as every minute of the story unfolds.
The series premiere of The Black Donnellys airs Feb. 26 on NBC (10 p.m. ET/PT, 11 p.m. MT) and Global (10 ET/PT, 8 p.m. MT).
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