TV review: Kin — they look like a family that runs a chain of coffee stops out of hipster horseboxes
Clare Dunne and Emmett J Scanlon in Kin. EMBARGOED until 09/11/2021
(RTÉ One Sundays and RTE Player) has two problems. and . Make a show about a crime family and you are going up against two of the greatest TV dramas of all time. It’s hard to stop people comparing your effort to the story of an Italian-American crime gang in New Jersey, or an Italian mob in the forlorn suburbs of Naples. It’s even harder to come out on the right side of this comparison. You need peerless plot-lines and sticky characters that you keep thinking about after the show is over. But more than that, you need to look right.
just doesn’t look right. It tells the story of a Dublin crime gang, the Kinsellas. Kudos for using a name that throws a nod towards a notorious real-life crime family in Dublin, but that’s about it in terms of authenticity.
The Kinsellas are father Frank (Aidan Gillen), his sister Birdy (Maria Doyle Kennedy), his three sons Jimmy, Michael and Eric, along with assorted partners and kids. If anything, they look like a family that runs a chain of coffee stops out of hipster horseboxes. For some reason, they have styled Aiden Gillen’ s Frank as a mild-mannered architect . None of the three sons look remotely hard. One of them, Jimmy even has a man-bun, but not in a threatening way.
Certainly not like Furio in , who had a very frightening ponytail. Or Gennaro Savastano in , who basically had a haircut all to himself. These things matter if you are going to go with them into their world.
So does the look and feel of the place they live. It made sense to me that Tony Soprano’s house looked like a 4-star hotel room, or that the Savastanos lived in a concrete bunker dominated by a giant portrait of themselves.
The Kinsellas live in Dublin 4, in a really interesting space. Maybe Frank is an architect after all. They sound like posh people pretending to be working class, rather than the other way around. This is a supply problem — there aren’t a lot of genuinely working-class actors in Ireland, judging by recent dramas on our screens. It might be better if RTÉ stuck to making shows about middle-class families, like , which hit all the right notes.
I haven’t given up on yet though . They weaved a clever plot in episode one, with the youngest (and most convincing) son Eric starting a hot-headed feud with a local drug dealer who is well in with drug-overlord Eamon Cunningham, played with menace by Ciarán Hinds. Cunningham okays a hit on Eric, which goes wrong and leads to the death of Jimmy with the manbun’s son. So now everyone is furious with each other, which is never a bad thing in a family crime drama.
Give it a bit more fireworks (you could see the death coming a mile off), and could have us hooked into October. If only we could believe it a little bit more.
