Smallscreen Reviews
Review: 'Brotherhood' is Showtime's crown jewel
By April MacIntyre
Sep 27, 2007, 7:16 GMT

“Brotherhood” is Blake Master’s intense east coast family drama returning to Showtime on Sunday at 10 ET/PT for a second season.  The show is a delicious, big Irish boiled dinner set in Providence, Rhode Island.

A Peabody Award winning show, “Brotherhood” was cited for "uniformly splendid acting and a strong sense of place." 

“Little Rhody” has long been rumored as the most politically corrupt state in America, even worse than Louisiana.

“Brotherhood's” hook is in the mesmerizing Caffee family dynamic.  With a face like a Roman statue, Tommy Caffee (Jason Clarke) is a rising politician, and his brother Michael (Jason Isaacs) is a returning anti-hero, a small time hood.  Both bear the neighborhood’s triangle gang tattoo on their wrists.

Michael is Tommy’s career Albatross, yet still has his heart and brother's loyalty.  Tommy needs him, and he hates to admit it. 

The scariest of them all is the “Rose of Dublin,” Michael and Tommy’s mum, played to the hilt by Fionnula Flanagan, who watches intently over her two Irish princes. 

Not since “Dallas” or “Dynasty” has such a strong, mature matriarchal role been played so well, or so intricately.  The writers do justice to her enormous talent.  

“Brotherhood” opens a window into an intact ethnic Irish-Catholic enclave in the Northeast.  The Hill in Providence is home to large families filled with priests, cops, firemen, politicians, criminals and the union labor chiefs who come together for Sunday supper, first communions and wakes.

David Chase, the creator of “Sopranos,” has truly exhausted the Italian-American mafia story with his excellent series, and it is missed.  But Masters’ “Brotherhood” deftly picks up the epic sweep and feel of Chase’s work, making it fresh with the Caffee brothers climbing political and crime family aspirations.

The clans stick together - family first - right or wrong.  “Brotherhood” gives the Irish-American mobsters their turn to spin yarns of mayhem, melancholy and murder.

The beauty of this series is the unexplored depth in historic material to draw from. The best example is the infamous Massachusetts Bulger brothers, archetypes for the Rhode Island Caffees.

Gangster James “Whitey” Bulger simply disappeared back in the mid-Nineties.  He was the older brother of University of Massachusetts chief and former State Senate president, William “Billy” Bulger. 

Both were born and raised in the hardcore Irish neighborhood of Southie - South Boston - considered the epicenter for the largest sources of I.R.A. money and firearm contraband shipped back to the Emerald Isle.

In “Brotherhood's” first season, Michael surprises everyone and comes home on The Hill, after a seven year, self-imposed exile for killing a predatory, butch lesbian for allegedly molesting a neighborhood girl.  The dead lesbian was the sister of a low level mobster who worked for big boss, Freddie Cork (Kevin Chapman).

The mobster's death at the hands of a union man freed Michael to return and make peace with Cork, who takes Michael back with a wary eye.

Sunday's premiere picks up six months after Michael’s brutal beating at a wedding.   He is now suffering from memory loss and occasional bouts of stupor.  Though reunited with his old girlfriend Kath, to Rose's chagrin, this season starts unsteadily for him.

Tommy Caffee was capped in the knees in season one when his addict wife, Eileen (Annabeth Gish), confessed to cheating on him and doing illegal drugs.  He is deeply humiliated and searching for answers and masculine reassurance.  Gish is a superb actress and dazzles as the woman who should be reveling in her rising status, but is cracking under the façade of her shadow existence.

He pays her back in spades by keeping her at arm’s length, contemptuously ignoring her and taking the advice of a political peer, who proffers advice on mistresses, setting up Tommy’s foray into a revenge extra-marital affair.

The new season’s wild card however, is the surprise return of a long-lost Irish cousin, the fantastically vile Colin Carr (Brían F. O'Byrne).

Problematic Colin nicked ladies underwear at age twelve before being sent back to Ireland with his mum, Rose’s sister.

“I want stay here, to be a Caffee.  In Belfast, I’m nuttin’, but here I’m someone,” he says, trying to bridge the frosty gulf between him and his Aunt Rose.  She isn’t buying anything he sells. He just isn’t that convincing.

“If you’re gonna take on a bigger man, you’d best slam him in the face with a brick before he knows he’s in a fight.” Advice cousin Colin offers Freddie Cork, when Michael’s right hand man, Pete (Stivi Paskoski) turns up dead and the murderer is identified as a son of the local Italian mobster.

“Don’t joke about the troubles.”  Colin says with deadly calm, admonishing one of Cork’s goons over an I.R.A. taunt.

Detective Declan Giggs (Ethan Embry) is another tortured player in the Caffee dynamic.  He was the one who nearly killed Michael at the wedding, but no one knows it.   His drinking and out of control behavior have set him up for his plotting superior to assign him as Freddie Cork’s “dirty cop,” so the DA can get the goods on everybody on The Hill.

Masters has artfully woven every shade of moral and ethical “grey” in matters of family, crime and politics in a regional American city that has been long overdue in this must see series; it is the best drama on television.

"Brotherhood" premieres Sunday, September 30th at 10 PM on Showtime.