Tommy Caffee is a rising political star in Providence, Rhode Island, dedicated to representing the working-class, predominantly Irish-immigrant neighbourhood where he grew up. Then, after a seven-year absence, his older brother Michael reappears. A notorious local gangster, Michael has similar ambitions to acquire power and influence, albeit it in a much shadier, distinctly non-civic capacity. Tommy and Michael’s renewed antagonism creates tensions in their close-knit family that spill out into the wider community. In a city of just 100,000 souls, everyone knows everyone. Providence simply doesn’t seem big enough for two Caffees.
As played by strapping Aussie Jason Clarke and wiry Brit Jason Isaacs, Tommy and Michael have strong chins and almost matching hairlines. Both exude a rough-hewn toughness (Clarke has since played a CIA torturer in Zero Dark Thirty and a Terminator in Genisys on the big screen) and, usefully, they look like they might actually be brothers. Brotherhood – which ran for three seasons on Showtime from 2006, screening briefly on FX in the UK – makes its prodigal theme explicit from the outset. “If Ma could, she’d kill every fatted calf in New England,” complains Tommy when Michael first re-enters their lives. Rose Caffee (Fionnula Flanagan) is a formidable matriarch who maintains selective blindness when it comes to her eldest son’s shortcomings. With her sharp tongue and insistence on regular family get-togethers, she almost resembles a US version of Ma Boswell from Bread.
The extended Caffee clan have their own problems. In public, Tommy’s wife Eileen (Annabeth Gish) play-acts the role of upstanding politician’s wife while pursuing torrid affairs and a drug habit. Mary-Kate (Kerry O’Malley), the youngest Caffee sibling, struggles to make ends meet; her guileless lawyer husband relies on Tommy for work. Local cop Declan (Ethan Embry) thinks of himself as one of the family after growing up just a few doors down, but when his long-standing relationships with both brothers compromises his career, he enters a self-destructive tailspin to rival any of McNulty’s legendary benders in The Wire.
Plenty of crime dramas explore shifting professional, criminal and familial loyalties. What makes Brotherhood memorable is its distinctive look and roving eye. While there are familiar scenes of day-to-day gangsterism, with hostile takeovers negotiated at the business end of a shotgun, it burrows just as deeply into the grubby machinations of local politics, where the tools of the trade are quid pro quo favours and blackmail. There are scenes of sex and violence, but the sex is rarely sexy and the sporadic bursts of violence, such as Michael hacking off a rival’s ear, are shocking rather than stylised.
Like The Wire, Brotherhood was shot relatively cheaply in authentic locations, from the faded clapboard houses of the old town to a variety of rundown dive bars. The milieu feels cluttered and lived-in. Many cable TV dramas aspire toward cinematic production values, staging lengthy, elaborate takes that draw attention to themselves. Brotherhood looks and feels bracingly immediate, like it could be happening round the corner.
With its shortened third season of eight episodes, Brotherhood also feels like a family saga that ends just a little too soon, although creator Blake Masters was given enough notice to craft a definitive ending. Masters had been inspired by legendary Boston racketeer James “Whitey” Bulger and his brother Bill, a beloved Massachusetts senator. That story has been adapted for the big screen as Black Mass, starring Johnny Depp and Benedict Cumberbatch as the Bulger brothers, though with the vampiric Whitey sucking up screentime, Billy barely has a chance to register. Brotherhood rebalances the relationship, giving both brothers enough room – and enough rope – to meet their fates.
