The adage that no good deed goes unpunished applies to the arts as well. When stuff is not very good but trying hard, it generally gets the benefit of the doubt. This has often been the case with Irish television drama. There is no better example than the first series of Love/Hate. It was far from brilliant, but almost everybody wanted it to work. It was ambitious, it had guts. Stuart Carolan was an obviously brilliant writer finding his feet in TV. We were thrilled to see top-class Irish screen actors such as Aidan Gillen, Robert Sheehan and Ruth Negga coming home. The sense that something serious was afoot generated enough goodwill to get Love/Hate over the bump of a rocky start.
Over the next two seasons Love/Hate dissipated that goodwill in the best possible way: it didn't need it. It was no longer trying hard – it was succeeding. Samuel Johnson's analogy with a dog standing on its hind legs – "the wonder is not that it is done well but that it is done at all" – was blown away by the growing evidence that it was being done very well indeed. And, because of this shift, Love/Hate began to be seen in a different light. It was no longer an Irish gangster drama but a gangster drama, full stop. It created a context in which the benefit of the doubt would be parochial and patronising. It stopped being compared, in the minds of most viewers, with RTÉ's previous, sometimes feeble efforts in the genre and started to be placed in the same frame as The Sopranos and The Wire.
Hence the widespread sense of disappointment with the fourth series and particularly with its ho-hum culmination. If the fourth series had been the first, we would have been breathless with wonder at how good it was. Instead it feels not as good as it could be. It can't avoid comparisons with the best of the golden age of American TV drama. Indeed, the fourth season invited those comparisons even further with its borrowings from The Wire. The new elements – the police surveillance unit and the ghetto kids sucked into the drug economy and spat out again – came straight from the David Simon playbook.
And quite right, too. When you're living in a golden age you'd be mad to settle for brass. Love/Hate does need to benchmark itself against the very best, not least because its audience is already doing so. The only thing wrong with such borrowings is that they don't go far enough. What Love/Hate needs to do is not to borrow from The Wire and The Sopranos but to steal. It has to take possession of what those shows managed to do.
What they did was definitively to transcend genre. Transcend does not mean ditch. The Sopranos was always a gangster show and The Wire was always a cop show. But the writers of both knew that they could not sustain great drama merely within those conventions. They broadened, enriched and ultimately transformed their genres by making one of two things increasingly central. Crudely, those things are women and politics. And it is women or politics that Love/Hate needs to explore if it is to breathe freely in the high altitude of excellence it now occupies.
What made The Sopranos more than a rip-off of Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas were six great female characters: Carmela, Livia, Meadow, Janice, Dr Melfi and Adriana. Much of the moral complexity that sustained the drama was theirs. And this female world expanded as the series went on. In Love/Hate, on the other hand, the female world has contracted. The cast has brilliant women, but the drama's centre of gravity is becoming increasingly male. Big characters such as Ruth Bradley's Mary and Ruth Negga's Rosie have disappeared without being adequately replaced. Nidge's wife, Trish (Aoibhinn McGinnity), has been sidelined. Charlie Murphy's Siobhan, superb in the third series, had minimal development in the fourth, even though, in terms of the plot, she occupies a potentially pivotal position. Seldom in Love/Hate do we see women interacting entirely with each other. In The Sopranos they did so all the time.
With The Wire, meanwhile, Simon transformed a cop show into a vehicle to explore systematically different layers of the life of Baltimore: the drug trade, the economy, the schools, the media, the political system. The Wire became the anatomy of a city. But Love/Hate hasn't done this either. If anything it has
become less political. Who can forget
John Boy's mural of Tupac and Biggie in heaven with Michael Collins and Bobby Sands? The Real IRA thread of the plot
has become thinner and petered out awkwardly in the fourth season. Political corruption and the media's ambivalent complicity with gangsterism are apparent no-go areas.
While The Wire gave us the political and economic context in which a bright ghetto kid ends up being shot to death, Love/Hate has the killing without the social context. Love/Hate even seems remarkably uninterested in the economic collapse; crime may be recessionproof, but viewers surely aren't.
The problem for Love/Hate is that we are no longer grateful for small mercies. It is made by a small team with, in international terms, few resources. But it has promoted itself to the premier league, where the game is tough and there are no points for effort.
fotoole@irishtimes.com
