Liverpool and Dublin are separated by 140 miles, but on screen the connection feels much closer. Both are port cities historically looked upon with a degree of bafflement, if not hostility, by their fellow citizens – Naples is the third in this trilogy, and you can also chuck in Marseilles – and places that television has got a kick out of slothfully stereotyping as hotbeds of drug-dealing iniquity.
Such caricatures are amped up with glee on RTÉ with Love/Hate and Kin. Liverpool has received the equivalent treatment with The Responder and The Cage – dramas Channel 4 producer Jimmy Mulville has described as all having “a big bag of cocaine in them”.
That criticism applies equally to This City Is Ours (RTÉ One, Wednesday, 10.15pm), which really does feel like the BBC’s answer to Love/Hate. Switch the accents and the shows are doppelgängers. As with Love/Hate (and Kin to a lesser extent), it is a tale of brutal yet lovable drug moguls, with Sean Bean heading the cast as the brooding family patriarch Ronnie Phelan and James Nelson-Joyce as his right-hand man Michael Kavanagh (why all the gangsters have Irish names is never explained).
This City Is Ours, which aired on BBC last year and now comes to RTÉ, is, at one level, a visual love letter to Liverpool. The city is depicted as a heaving metropolis caught between the bustle of the modern world and the shadow of its colourful past (which extends back to its days as a linchpin of the international slave trade).
But beyond this vaguely articulated sense that Liverpool is a special place that deserves to be championed, This City Is Ours doesn’t know what it wants to be. As Michael, Nelson-Joyce delivers a muddled portrayal of a thoughtful young man trying to outrun his criminal heritage and to start a new life with his girlfriend (Hannah Onslow).
Nelson-Joyce does his best to bring subtlety to the part of the conflicted thug. However, his performance is entirely at variance with the cartoonish Bean. The Lord of the Rings/Game of Thrones actor seems to think he’s rocked up in a straight-to-DVD Guy Ritchie rip-off. To that end, he goes completely over the top as the two-dimensional villain Ronnie.
So there are lots of missteps. Surely the biggest is the waste of Derry Girls actor Saoirse-Monica Jackson, left adrift with the two-dimensional part of a gangster Wag. While she does her best to imbue her character with the vaguest outline of a personality, the script gives her nothing to work with. Her performance is a scream into the void.
Jackson was hilarious in Derry Girls. She could bring the house down simply by adjusting the angle of a grimace or widening her eyes. Alas that show remains the highlight of her career, and she has yet to find a new project equal to her talents. It certainly isn’t This City Is Ours – yet another crime drama that paints Liverpool as a charming cauldron of crooks and cads but lacks the wit or the will to do anything interesting with that cliche.