Not Quite A Shining City On A Hill

In theory, Showtime’s City on a Hill should have the hallmarks of great television. It comes from producer Tom Fontana, who created the greatest network police procedural in Homicide and started the TV revolution with Oz. He returns to the world of law and crime in 1992 Boston, the same city he examined so well in St. Elsewhere. The series also bears the production credit of southies Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, who’ve examined this world in many of their films (Affleck went very specific in his adaptations of Gone Baby Gone and The Town, both of which take place in this era.) The leads are Kevin Bacon, one of the greatest actors in history who has done more than his share of Boston lawmen, and Aldis Hodge, who has played complicated black men in Friday Night Lights and Leverage.  The series also has such great character actors as Sarah Shahi, Kevin Chapman and Jill Hennessy in its supporting cast.

The series adds up to appointment television. Why then does it seem like we’ve seen so much of it before, and done better? Bacon plays Jackie Rohr, a wizened and quasi-corrupt FBI man running through Charlestown, complaining about the ‘good old days’ to anyone who’ll listen, sleeping with Asian prostitutes, snorting coke, and basically ignoring his family. (Personally, if you’re married to Jill Hennessy, and you’re choosing to have sex in the back of Chinese restaurants, you’re depraved in a way I have very little sympathy for.) Hodge plays Ducarcy Ward, an ex-Brooklyn attorney, trying to make a name for himself in Boston, and instead pissing everybody off. When he advoc recommends jail time for cops, he pisses off white law enforcement, and when he tries to negotiate for the cops after a shooting in a black church, he’s called an Uncle Tom by a black minister.

  Ward says he wants to ‘tear down the machinery in this fucked up city’. He finds himself turning to Rohr, who has him trying to get information on an armored car job in order to go after the Charlestown criminals, who were in the 1990s, notorious for being the most criminal section perhaps in the entire country. These people are represented by the Ryan family, who are really the most original part of this entire series. Frankie is the head of a gang that pulls these armored car jobs, and is a family besides.  The matriarch of the family Siobhan tries to look after her family, and has the job of laundering the money they steal. But the loosest one of the bunch is Jimmy, who seems to have some kind of mental disorder, and never seems quite able to understand just how dangerous the life he’s chosen has become, no matter how much his elder brother tries to tell him.

City on a Hill is one of those series where the sum of its parts somehow seems greater than the whole. The partnership between Ward and Rohr seems so familiar – we’ve seen in far too many dramas over the last twenty years. The initial partnership seems based on bigotry and necessity. But when Jackie and Ward have a conversation after the shooting in the church, there’s a gentleness in his tone that we almost never here anywhere else in the series. It sings in a way that so much of the other TV doesn’t. But watching Jackie go to a free clinic to deal with getting VD, his mother-in-law finding out, his problems with his teenage daughter – it’s tired, and its barely salvageable by Bacon’s natural charisma. Hodge is much better in trying to negotiate the two worlds, and fully admitting he’s part of neither. But we know too well that these are men on intersecting paths – Ward’s is going up, Rohr’s going down – and its rather too familiar at this stage.

Don’t get me wrong. City on a Hill is a good show, with great actors and some genuinely interesting insight into an era that’s not that far behind us. I was happy when I saw it. I was expecting to be a lot happier.

My score : 3.5 stars.