“I sort of hope they all die,” is never the reaction a television drama wishes to evoke. But in relation to the drug-running family the Phelans and their colleagues and connections that make up This City Is Ours, that just might be your response.
Sean Bean plays cocaine-smuggling patriarch Ronnie Phelan, who has enjoyed a long career dominating Liverpool’s drug trade. He is now considering retirement and, it seems, is planning to hand over the reins to his right-hand man of 20 years, Michael (James Nelson-Joyce, recently brilliant as Treacle Goodson in A Thousand Blows). Michael is pretty pleased. It almost makes up for his discovery that he has a low sperm count and that he and Diana (Hannah Onslow), the love of his life, will need to use IVF to start a family. If that all seems a jarring juxtaposition, it is. Scenes of violence are spliced with Michael’s sentimental moonings over pictures of his embryonic children, demanding that we see the irony and feel the humanity of a thirtysomething who is only now beginning to see what life may be really all about and to start groping towards some kind of escape and betterment for the next generation.
But you know how it goes. Just when you’re thinking about getting out after IVF implantation, they pull you back in. This time because a large shipment of drugs goes missing, putting the scouse Sopranos in hock to their Colombian pals and requiring them to identify the rat in their midst. This is duly done, but in the course of the bloody investigation, Ronnie’s eldest son Jamie (Jack McMullen) moves up in his father’s affections and is soon effectively challenging Michael for control of the family empire. Some of this takes place in the luxurious Phelan villa in Spain, which is nice for them and also provides handy outbuildings where people can be shot and nearby clifftops from which bodies can be tossed.
The Sopranos’ influence can be felt in the insistent interspersal of Normal Family Life Events interrupting the action (which is tense and well done) – Sunday lunches, wives nagging husbands about healthy diets, communal dancing at Jamie’s son’s christening – but this is diffusion-line stuff in the extreme. There is no emotional depth, no heart to it and, thanks to many lingering shots of people with faces expressing inner turmoil and/or conflicted loyalties and/or crushing moral burdens, a languorous pace lets any momentum built up by those tense set pieces drain away.
There is a subplot around Diana’s past – her mother is in prison but they remain close – that seems designed to hint at the power of intergenerational trauma and makes us fear for her and Michael’s future babies. It adds a little interest. So, momentarily, does the approach by Cheryl (Saoirse-Monica Jackson) – the wife of one of Ronnie and Michael’s associates – at the christening to warn Diana that being a moll is a soul-sucking existence. “There’s nothing good about our men” she says, as lovestruck Diana looks at her with disbelief. “I’m you,” she adds, “sooner than you think.”
Perhaps if it had followed the lives of the compromised women behind the bad men there might have been a richer experience here. Instead, the series follows the traditional route and tropes as power struggles, beatings and scary negotiations with bigger boys up the chain take place, further betrayals are uncovered, ambition and greed war with finer feelings, and more inner turmoils, pained expressions and grisly murders ensue.
The essential emptiness at the core of This City Is Ours is tempered by the performances, especially from Sean Bean, who can do gnarly bastard in his sleep, and from Julie Graham as Ronnie’s wife, Elaine, toughened by years on the periphery of violent crime, who nails the hard-bitten vibe the part requires. And Stephen Walters as Davy Crawford is wholly convincing as a man just not made for gangland life, however much he wishes he was.
It is entertaining enough. But it feels too much like too many things we have seen before. Michael, despite Nelson-Joyce’s best efforts, remains an underwritten cipher and there is no one to root truly for or against. Liverpool and Spain look nice, though.
• This City Is Ours aired on BBC One and is on iPlayer now
