During the past decade, white working-class men and women have received far more attention from presidential candidates than they have from purveyors of a certain kind of upmarket popular culture who presume that the story of an alienated bricklayer in Harrisburg, Pa., would hold little interest for a software designer in Cupertino, Calif.
That sense of partisanship is particularly pronounced in premium cable television. And it is worth speculating whether “Brotherhood” (7 p.m. Sunday, Showtime), which is beginning its third exceptional season, would have found its way to Showtime at all if not for Dennis Lehane, whose novels have brought white New England ethnics into artistic vogue.
Lehane’s territory is the South End of Boston. “Brotherhood” is set 50 miles farther down Interstate Highway 95, in Providence, R.I., whose history of corruption the show’s creator, Blake Masters, uses as if it were an environmental toxin eroding away at everything. In a fictional neighborhood called the Hill, the Caffee brothers claim authority, Tommy (Jason Clarke) from a Democratic seat in the state legislature and Michael (Jason Isaacs), his nemesis, from a middle-management perch in the local mob.
The Hill is predominantly Irish, but everywhere you look, that hegemony is dissipating — Italians and Portuguese have long taken a piece of the action, and the newly arrived Dominicans and Vietnamese are running drugs and undercutting profits from prostitution rings. When Tommy ran for re-election last season and realized Latinos weren’t supporting him, he finagled early closes for voting booths in Hispanic neighborhoods and got volunteers to call his constituents and claim his opponent held anti-immigration positions. In this world, corruption is institutionalized, the bedrock of civic life. There are no alternatives: Governors and mayors and state senators distinguish themselves from one another only by the degree of their fraudulence.
The current season revolves in part around Tommy’s wish to get out of the legislature and off the Hill, a desire that drives him to even more baroque duplicity. He is changing course not as a result of a bruised soul but because he realizes that all of his unsavory behavior still won’t guarantee the ascension he has envisioned for himself. Comparisons to “The Sopranos” have been made since “Brotherhood” first appeared. But Tony Soprano had money and power — his series was the product of a boom economy. Tommy is essentially forced to choose between the two.
“The Sopranos” was largely a narrative of assimilation, an Italian-American family striving to count in the affluent society. “Brotherhood” depicts a world more narrowly circumscribed — one in which people aren’t thinking much about making it even to the other side of town, where the children of the ruling class are going to Brown University. Tommy and his wife, Eileen (Annabeth Gish), have three daughters, but you don’t see medical school in their future. Aerial shots of Providence show circling highways outlining the city and trapping it, as if there really weren’t anywhere to go. No show on television has better captured the will to ethnic insularity.
It is embodied most powerfully by the Irish actress Fionnula Flanagan, who plays the Caffee matriarch Rose with a ferocity that suggests she is channeling all the rage of the Gaelic wars. Michael has inherited his mother’s indignation. As the brothers, both Isaacs and Clarke are actors of incredible focus who never let you imagine what they might look like happy.
Michael and Tommy personify the show’s central tension, which is not a battle between the dangerous and the ambiguously decent, but rather between the morally deadened and the ethically unhinged. The show continually asks us: What is worse, apathy or self-delusion?
“Brotherhood” seems to suffer under the misfortune of timing. Had it arrived 10 or 15 years earlier, when long-form narrative was not the dominant form on cable television, it would have been felt, arguably, more as an explosion than a trickle. The series has at least so far failed to find a large audience, indicating perhaps how much we have come to take good serial drama for granted.
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More on actor Jason Isaacs: Read an interview with Jason Isaacs and Viggo Mortensen. PAGE 16