The Black Donnellys: C+

In the fall of 2005, Paul Haggis wrote and directed a little drama called Crash. The film was a near brilliant exploration of race and prejudice and it garnered him huge amounts of attention both for dividing critics and audiences (insipid! incisive!) and winning Best Picture. I had hoped that Crash was only one peak in a long, continued stream of brilliance. With Haggis' latest effort (with seminal co-man Bobby Moresco) I may have to eat crow.

The Black Donnellys is built on the foundations laid by shows like The Sopranoes and Brotherhood. It says that blood and family can't exist without each other and really that the latter is the definition for the former and vice-versa. Well, Haggis (who wrote and directed the first two episodes and serves as exec. producer) has certainly proved there is blood...a lot of it (for network television). We've got bodies being pummelled by sledgehammers, little brothers beaten near to death, a villain with a literal (!) axe to grind, and lots and lots of guns. Where then is the family?

Centering on the four Donnelly Brothers - Sean (Michael Stahl-David), Kevin (Billy Lush), Tommy (Jonathan Tucker), and Jimmy (Tom Guiry) - the show makes vague gestures at family and such but it finds much more joy in stacking things up (blood-wise) to knock them all down. I can't disagree, at times it makes for enjoyable drama. And the writing isn't half-bad (though, again, from an Oscar winning writer I would have expected more). My problem exists then with Tommy, as the central character in this massive, muddled, Greek tragedy.

Jonathan Tucker plays him with nice, steely resolve but since his character (and really every brother) professes to such an ingrained sense of love and protectiveness for his brothers you'd think that it would materialize on screen, right? Wrong. Though the first episode fared better, this second one finds Tommy flailing around with his younger brother Kevin like a paranoid jerk. His every movement seems powered by anger and selfishness. Ok, so he makes token gestures of affection near the end but that can't near make up for a lack of central character.Where Crash skated by on it's gigantic cast (thereby bypassing any real need for love), here The Black Donnellys is drowning in its own stoicism. The brothers, Tommy especially, are still such horribly opaque characters that even if their hearts were breaking (over Sean's ICU hospital stay, over being sucked into organized crime) we don't get to see them often enough to care.