The Black Donnellys review
The pilot episode of The Black Donnellys, a new series from Crash writer/director Paul Haggis, is not good. It’s a lightweight, CW-quality episode that doesn’t do justice to what this show will with any luck achieve. But the potential makes the pilot invigorating.
This episode, and hopefully only this episode, is told from the perspective of Joey Ice Cream (Keith Nobbs). His galling narration, which he gives as part of an interrogation, rushes the story of the Donnelly brothers along with only the episode’s final moments in mind. In 40 minutes that could have filled nearly 160 minutes we get a shallow history of the four Donnelly boys.
Most importantly, though, we meet Tommy (Jonathan Tucker). He’s the Michael Corleone of the Donnellys who is supposed to be better than his thug siblings. He’s going to art school while his addict brother Jimmy (Tom Guiry) robs and steals his way through their Irish neighborhood. Jimmy and the other two Donnellys go so far as to kidnap the nephew of an Italian boss and hold him for ransom. Like similar situations, Tommy has to clean up his brothers’ mess. This time, however, Tommy can’t do it without creating enough trouble to fill a series.
In spite of the flaws, and there are a lot of them, The Black Donnellys has the makings of an epic crime saga. Haggis, who before writing the trite and superficial Crash also wrote Clint Eastwood’sMillion Dollar Baby, channels his command of dialect and character into another contemporary drama. While it’s not yet as grand in scope as most other great television shows, The Black Donnellys may in time be better than The Sopranos.
I’ve said a lot of negative stuff about his pilot, but I’m excited because I said the same stuff about NBC’s superhero saga Heroes. Both Donnellys andHeroes had unsatisfying first episodes, but episodes that made me want to comeback and be fulfilled.
Jonathan Tucker is one reason (maybe the only reason) I plan to keep watching. Tucker plays Tommy Donnelly with genuine heart. While the other Donnelly brothers, the robbers and cops all seem like text book crime-story characters, Tucker never lets you realize that he is too. I trust him as a guide. More so than that Ice Cream guy
The downside of that is that Tucker, whose work in films like The Deep Endand Hostage made me see him as a future Oscar contender, will leave the movies for small screen success. While that may not appear to be a great career move, Tucker will have the advantage of working with executive producer and Oscar-winner Haggis. Haggis won’t stop making movies anytime soon, which means he’ll likely have roles for a talent like Tucker.
Still, Tucker’s turn in the last few minutes of the show, his real Michael Corleone-moment, hooked me enough to forget about Tucker’s potential film career. It even makes me forget that the show will bump Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip from the NBC lineup. In spite of the electronic music soundtrack, the annoyingly misleading narrator and a cast made for a CW teen drama, I want to see Tommy Donnelly’s rise to power. It’s going to be brutal.
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