Forget the Fab Four – the Liverpudlian crime family in new series This City is Ours doesn’t want to hold your hand… David Michael Brown explores its sombre mob machinations and backstabbing skullduggery.
This City is Ours enters a market over-saturated with vicious cockney geezers, head-splitting ultra-violence and reckless backstabbing. What this tough-talking and razor-edged gangster drama adds is a sense of time and place combined with the brutal reality that no one is expendable.
The city in question is Liverpool. But look behind the British city of culture that spawned the Fab Four and arguably the greatest football team on the planet and there is more than a cliched bunch of cheeky scousers nicking hubcaps. This is a hard-hitting, drug-fuelled world that lurks in the shadows, deep in the depths of the criminal underworld.
The show centres on Michael Kavanagh (a lean sinewy performance from James Nelson-Joyce), a long-time lieutenant for the Phelan crime family who must face the harsh realities of his chosen profession when he begins to contemplate going straight after falling in love and wanting to start a family with Diana Williams (Hannah Onslow). When his boss Ronnie Phelan (the ever-charismatic Sean Bean) announces his retirement from the criminal underworld, the organisation goes into freefall.
The big question tearing apart loyalties is who will take control? Ronnie’s ambitious son Jamie (a brutish Jack McMullen) or Kavanagh. Unease and distrust escalate, especially when a drug shipment goes missing, until Kavanagh takes things into his own hands and must live with the consequences of his actions, constantly looking over his shoulder.
The most profitable business of the “Firm” is cocaine, which they import into the city courtesy of a Colombian supplier based in Marbella, Spain (which is where Sean Bean’s drug lord holidays in his palatial “pied-à-terre”). When the Phelans holiday en masse, you can’t help thinking of Sexy Beast or the second Sweeney movie spin-off when Regan and Carter hotfoot it to the Costa del Sol.
But in reality, the sombre mob machinations and backstabbing skullduggery that drive the nefarious members of the Phelan family play more like a Shakespearian tragedy—in particular ambition, greed and the corrupting influence of power in Macbeth—than the freewheeling wise-crackery of Guy Ritchie or classic British gangster films like Get Carter or The Long Good Friday.
Unlike the operatic high-octane bloodbaths of Gangs of London and the showy casting of MobLand, This City is Ours is a far more downbeat and sombre affair than its fellow recently streamed crime shows—and all the better for it. While Gareth Evans’ high bodycount show cut through cast members with bloody aplomb, this new Liverpool-based drama sees the characters traumatised with the death of even the most lowly of characters.
Even though its focus might not be explosive action spectacle, This City is Ours never lets up in the brutality stakes. And this violence resonates and hits hard.
Especially when it comes to Sean Bean. No one gives a killer performance like Sean Bean. Since he was famously decapitated as Ned Stark in Game of Thrones, he has become the talisman for death. No one has been safe in television since. Looking back at Bean’s career, his on-screen deaths are the stuff of legend.
From death by a herd of cows in The Field to death by satellite dish in GoldenEye to every stabbing, shooting and head-lopping in between, his movie deaths became so frequent that the actor now turns down roles that end with his grisly demise. Luckily, he didn’t turn down This City is Ours…
The rest of the ensemble, some who live and some who are not so lucky, are equally as effective. Whether dancing to Northen Soul or cracking skulls, the Phelan family is a delightful mix of bouffant-wielding tracksuit clad new money. As well as the aforementioned leads, Julie Graham is a tower of strength as Elaine Phelan, Ronnie’s wife, and Saoirse-Monica Jackson (of Derry Girls fame) makes a welcome appearance as a wife who wants revenge for the death of her partner at the hands of the Phelans.
What’s interesting in this series, as the consequences of Kavanagh’s reckless actions escalate and bodies begin to drop in a brazen display of raging machismo, is that the women behind the gangsters step up. Usually relegated to arm candy or as a gangster’s moll, it’s refreshing to see the testosterone tempered as the female of the species play a far bigger part in proceedings. When the proverbial hits the fan and Kavanagh and Jamie Phelan wage war, it’s their better halves who try to calm things down as their partners butt heads.
Another highlight of the show is the music. Bean’s patriarch is obsessed with the crooners of old like Matt Monroe, Bobby Darin and Frankie Valli, who soundtrack the stabs of violence that punctuate the series. With barely a nod to Lennon and McCartney, the intense atmosphere of the show is greatly assisted by Rael Jones’ propulsive score, but the heart of the show comes from the records that would undoubtedly be in Phelan’s record collection—highlighting the generational shift taking place in the crime family.
Only during the often alcohol fuelled family tradition of the choreographed line dance to Andy Williams’ The House of Bamboo is the simmering threat of disruption diluted. But when the music stops and the fighting continues, the juxtaposition is all too clear.
They may be different, however, but both of the warring factions in this battle for the mean streets of Liverpool want one thing. For the city to be theirs.
