Brotherhood
Wednesday, August 5th, 2009
Brotherhood takes place in a fictional Irish neighborhood “The Hill” in Rhode Island. The brothers being Michael Caffee (Jason Isaacs) who is a gangster and Tommy Caffee (Jason Clarke) who is in local politics. Both men do what they feel is right to protect and or improve their neighborhood. At the beginning of the series Michael returns from hiding the man that wanted him killed had died. He quickly gets back into old tricks and starts working for the local crime boss who he buts heads with frequently. Michael’s return isn’t great for Tommy who is trying to move up the ladder in local politics and it makes it harder when your brother is killing people and selling drugs in the community. So there is obvious friction there. But they are still family. Tommy Caffee is the “good” brother with an attractive wife and 3 young girls but of course things arent as perfect as they seem. The wife is the most selfish character in the series (although they did soften her later) and Tommy has no problem in the cut throat world of state politics. Another key character in the series is detective Declan Giggs (Ethan Embry) who you might remember from the 1995 movie Empire Records as the goofy kid Mark. For most of the series that role was in my head but Ethan did a good job his character has a pretty good character arc and he was able to pull it off. Declan grew up with the Caffee brothers and his friendship and their various dealings make things complicated for his character.
The acting and casting for in Brotherhood are both good. Music doesnt play much of a role in the series and the accents tend to come and go. A lot of the stuff in the series is believable Michael is a bad man but Rhode Island is a small state and he has to take orders from the Italians that control Jersey. The political fighting and wheeling and dealing Tommy is in seems like those things could and do happen in the real world. Also shooting on location in Rhode Island really adds to the realism of the series. Brotherhood lasted for 3 seasons on showtime and there was a total of 29 episodes. Its first season got a lot of critical acclaim and it was pretty deserving but as the the series went on it continued to get worse. The second season wasnt good as the first but ok but I thought the third was a total waste. They did wrap the series up in the last few moments of the last episode but besides the detectives story line all the others were a waste. Brotherhood is like the musician who has that one really nice debut album then never even comes close the rest of his carear.
Brotherhood was the idea of Blake Masters who had sold some movie scripts in Hollywood but none had been made. So since he was still green in the business they brought in Henry Bromell to help out. Bromell worked on Homicide Life on the Street in which Masters was a big fan of. The lion share of the episodes of Brotherhood were written either by Masters or Bromell with a few each season written by the shows other handful of writers. In doing a little extra research for this article I found an interview Blake Masters did with the Writers Guild of America and he says “We have the loosest of season plans. We take every story we think is interesting and stick it on file cards on a board and sort of vaguely see what could go where.” This hey whatever happens man casual approach is most likely why the show went from being a quality show to being canceled. Most shows fall off you only have some many ideas and places to take your characters but Brotherhood seemed to really fall off fast maybe if Masters had more of a plan things would have held together longer.
Right now you can stream the first two seasons on Netflix streaming and season 3 will be out on DVD in October.
