Brotherhood is a show that I've really been late to the party with. I've been watching the repeat run on FX at the moment. I remember reading about it when it started and immediately decided that it must be American cable channel Showtime's version of The Sopranos. But it's more than that.
Featuring two non-Americans playing Irish-American brothers who live and work on "the hill" in Providence, Rhode Island, we get an insight into the lives of both local political machinations, and gangsters.
Jason Clarke plays Tommy Caffee, a local politician who's getting on the world, while Jason Isaacs plays his brother Michael. As the series starts, Michael's returned from a seven year self-imposed exile to find things have changed on the hill. His brother doesn't really want to have much to do with him since association with organised crime isn't really in the How to Get On in Politics handbook.
There's a sprawling cast, and we see all sides of the law and disorder that seems endemic in East Coast suburban America. It's funny to read how pleased local politicians in the real Rhode Island are that Showtime makes the show locally employing local talent etc, irrespective of the not-so-great light that it casts on those very same politicians. They even rent out their own chamber and offices to the production company.
Anyway, the UK DVD boxset's not out yet, but the US one is. I recommend tracking it down if you don't get FX.
Finally, a complaint. When will Showtime realise that shutting the rest of the world out from your website really serves no purpose at all. It's not like they're streaming material on the site. The site's not actually even any good, with little to no opportunity to look the details of programmes that aren't currently on-air with it. So why shut the rest of the world out?
Five Days was broadcast over a two-week period on BBC1, not over, say, five days, which might have seemed the sensible way to schedule it.
Still at the end of the first and second episodes, we had a plaintive appeal from the BBC1 continuity announcer asking us to set our digital video recorders to record the whole series to ensure we didn't miss an episode. Obviously they really meant "Sky+" but the BBC being the BBC, they couldn't mention it. The fact that there's no other system currently out there that can do this without you providing at least some details about when the programme's on, doesn't really come into it.
Anyway, I did "Sky+" the entire series and very good it was too. The cast was excellent as we dipped into an ongoing case that began with the disappearance of first a young mother and then, separately, her two children at the start of day one. We returned on day three of the investigation with a full head of steam behind things, and then again at day twenty-eight, day thirty-four and day seventy-nine.
Along the way, a top-notch cast takes us through events with plot details unfolding in a not-terribly spectacular, but utterly convincing manner. I was completely hooked and loved Hugh Bonneville's almost diffident detective. We don't often see TV crime stories played out over such a protracted length of time, with cases either being solved in days, or perhaps being reopened from times gone by. What we were able to observe in this series was the devastating impact of the dissapearances and perhaps murders, on the extended family.