Shot entirely on location, Cain and Abel saga pulls you in after complex pilot
01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, July 9, 2006
BY ANDY SMITH
Journal Television Writer
A little patience will be amply rewarded when you watch Brotherhood, the new series from premium cable channel Showtime that is set and filmed entirely in Rhode Island.
This is a show that gets better and better as it goes along.
Brotherhood debuts tonight at 10, then runs for 10 more episodes in the same time slot.
Brotherhood stars Jason Clarke as Tommy Caffee, an ambitious state representative who represents a fictional working-class Irish neighborhood called The Hill.
Jason Isaacs plays his brother, Michael, a criminal who has reappeared after a mysterious seven-year absence. Michael's return sets off a dark, complex saga that intertwines politics and crime, loyalty and betrayal, family and ambition.
Unfortunately, tonight's pilot is not the easiest entry into Brotherhood. Many characters are introduced, many wheels are set in motion, and it's sometimes difficult to tell exactly who's doing what to whom. Or why.
In addition, there are a few moments of savage, bloody violence that can be tough to watch.
The very first thing you see on Brotherhood, for example, is an ugly racial confrontation at a construction site. The N word is used, more than once. And the battle of words swiftly escalates into a brutal beating with a shovel.
It's a disquieting way to start a series and a signal that this is a pay-cable drama, not a network series.
After the pilot is where the patience pays off. By episode three or four, Brotherhood gets much more satisfying, and a few episodes after that, it becomes downright engrossing. Characters gain new dimension, motivations are revealed, and the plot begins to unfold in some fascinating, and occasionally unexpected, directions.
Tommy Caffee is not entirely good. Even Michael Caffee is not entirely bad.
The final episode, which brings all the characters together at a big Irish wedding at Rhodes-on-the-Pawtuxet, is a corker.
And the acting is at a very high level, with Isaacs exuding menace as Michael Caffee and Clarke showing the stress of juggling too many competing priorities.
Fionnula Flanagan is wonderful as their mother, Rose, who takes guff from no one. She has a soft spot for her oldest boy, Michael, even though she knows he does terrible things. (Including giving her counterfeit money.)
So Brotherhood is worth the effort.
Outside perspective
Curious to see how the show came across to someone who doesn't live here, I called Ed Bark, TV critic for The Dallas Morning News. Bark generally gave Brotherhood a thumbs up, but said it will face inevitable comparisons with The Sopranos.
He was particularly impressed with the way Isaacs radiates a sense of danger.
"I think it's a solid, well-acted show, and it's a show that gets better as it goes along," he said. "It's a show I would like to keep watching."
As Bark pointed out, any story that combines family and crime will be compared with The Sopranos, which, despite an uneven season this spring, still casts a huge shadow over the television landscape.
But while there are some superficial similarities between the two shows in terms of subject matter and language, they display very different styles.
The Sopranos, for example, only touches on politics, and Tony Soprano is not exactly nostalgic about the bonds of community.
For the Caffees of Providence, though, The Hill is a huge part of who they are. Politician Tommy is constantly trying to balance his ambition with his duty to protect his constituents.
Even Michael tries to protect The Hill in his own brutal way -- beating up teenagers who urinate on the sidewalk, or burning down a house in the process of gentrification.
The Sopranos and Brotherhood are very different in tone, as well. The Sopranos has a deep undercurrent of dark humor. Brotherhood does not.
The show does offer a few moments of irony, though. In one scene, Tommy Caffee is giving a rousing speech: "These are new days in Rhode Island -- the smoke-filled back rooms, the sweetheart deals, the insider handshake -- those are the old ways."
Uh-huh. Seconds before the speech, Tommy was in a back room making a sweetheart deal.
But by and large, most of the characters spend the 11 episodes of Brotherhood spiraling downward.
Tommy, for example, finds it harder and harder to maintain his political career, hold on to his integrity, and still stay loyal to his brother.
His wife, Eileen (Annabeth Gish, in another superb performance), feels trapped in the role of dutiful political wife and mother, and enters into a pattern of destructive behavior.
You are there
Watching Brotherhood can be an odd experience for a Rhode Islander.
It's almost impossible to avoid playing the game of Where-Are-We-Now, especially in the early episodes: "Look, it's Westminster Street! Prospect Terrace! The Stadium Theatre! The Hot Club! Hey, where the heck is that?"
In interviews, Brotherhood's actors and producers describe their considerable efforts to reproduce Rhode Island accents, including dialect lessons on iPods for the actors.
The effort was complicated because Isaacs is British and Clarke is Australian. Besides, there is no single definitive Rhode Island accent.
To Rhode Island ears, the results are mixed. Some of the characters sound local, but others speak as though they've just come from South Boston.
Besides the accents, Brotherhood writer/creator Blake Masters obviously did a lot of research into Rhode Island, and the show is full of knowing references to real places -- Fox Point, Barrington, Mount Pleasant, the East Side, South Providence.
Brotherhod's state legislators are part-timers, just as they are in real life, and must earn a living with outside jobs. (Tommy Caffee is trying to sell an old mill to a group of Boston investors who want to turn it into condos.)
The Hill, though, doesn't exist anywhere but in Masters' script, and it can be a little jarring to have this artificial construct plunked down in the midst of what seems to be a very real Providence.
By the middle of the show's 11-episode run, though, the novelty of seeing Providence on the screen began to wear off, and I found myself increasingly absorbed in the story -- which is a good sign for Brotherhood
