From The Calgary Sun ...
Brotherhood fills Sopranos hunger nicely
By SUN NEWS SERVICES
Some are already calling it "The O'Sopranos."
With the cast of HBO's biggest hit taking a break from their nefarious doings until next January, cable fans have been left with a need for another family crime drama. Showtime was happy to help out, stepping up to fill the gap with something that's as tough, as conflicted and hopefully as addictive as The Sopranos, but with an Irish accent.
Say hello to Brotherhood, which will begin airing July 9. It's a crime drama in which baked ziti and red wine give way to corned beef, cabbage and Guinness.
Set in a fictional, working-class Irish neighbourhood called "the Hill" in Providence, R.I., Brotherhood is the tale of two brothers, Tommy and Michael Caffee.
Tommy, the younger brother, is a smoke-filled-room kind of guy, a sort of low-rent Kennedy who, as a state representative, wheels and deals his way through the halls of power. His older brother, Michael, returning to the Hill after seven years on the lam, is a career criminal struggling to regain his power base in the old neighbourhood.
Australian actor Jason Clarke plays Tommy. Playing the role of Michael is 43-year-old Jason Isaacs, a lean, handsome, classically-trained English actor from Liverpool.
"Michael is really tortured," Isaacs says.
"One of the things that allows you into the character is he's deeply unhappy, because something has happened to him in those seven years away, which has scarred him and that he may never get over. And I can't wait to find out what it is."
If The Sopranos is operatic in scale, Brotherhood has the melancholy, elegiac quality of an Irish lament.
Its characters are neither all bad nor all good, and they fight ferociously, each in his or her own way, to cling to a vanishing lifestyle. Tommy laments the fading of a once-prosperous neighbourhood and his own faltering marriage.
Brotherhood has obvious shades of the real-life Bulger bothers of Massachusetts, one of whom rose to become a Massachusetts state senator and university president, while the other has ended up as a fugitive criminal. But producer/creator Blake Masters says in a separate interview, the show's pedigree can also be traced to another famous crime family.
"There's a great scene in The Godfather that was probably one of the first inspirations of this," Masters says, "where Marlon Brando says to Al Pacino, 'You should have been Senator Corleone.'
"I said, 'Well, what if he was, and what if Sonny was running the family?' "
Kiss me, I'm a gangster
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