TV & RadioReview

Kin review: Dublin city is just a moody backdrop as gangsters bumble in the gloom

Television: It looks great but style only goes so far and, two seasons in, Kin’s lack of substance is impossible to ignore

Charlie Cox and Maria Doyle Kennedy in season two of Kin. Photograph: RTÉ

Ed Power's face
Ed Power
Sun Mar 19 2023 - 22:35

Dublin is a flat, low-key city that it takes time to get to know. It has its charms, but, wherever else they may reside, they aren’t on the surface. Paradoxically, the opposite is true of Kin (RTÉ One, 9.30pm), a slick gangland thriller set amid the capital’s docklands which has oodles of flash yet lacks a soul.

That hollowness was laid bare in the finale of its first series, in which seemingly meek Amanda (Clare Dunne) was revealed as the ruthless mastermind in the family business.

The problem was that the scene in which her killer instinct was unmasked was a clunky pastiche of the end of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, complete with the juxtaposition of her enemies being gunned down with Amanda piously attending a religious ceremony (a commemorative mass for her dead son rather than a Baptism). I’ve seen better cover versions at the Red Cow Inn.

[ Clare Dunne: ‘Let’s stop being obsessed with getting everything by the time you are f**king 30’ ]

Kin returns with the same blend of Hollywood gloss and hollowed-out script. To look at, it’s a stone-cold stunner. Moody drone shots of the Poolbeg chimneys and the blue-lattice Exo Building beside the 3Arena pack a wallop. If you didn’t know better – obviously we all do – you might think Dublin had a skyline.

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But if it dazzles from 10 storeys up, when you zoom in the flaws start to show. The Kinsellas – any parallels with real-life Dublin criminal dynasties are entirely coincidental, we’re assured – are on the back foot after Amanda’s bloodletting. While they’ve taken out bigwig Eamon Cunningham, the Turkish cartel to whom he owed €70 million is coming for its cash.

The most striking thing about the Kinsellas is how inept they are. Amanda can’t decide whether to be ruthless or passive. Her uncle-in-law, Frank (Aidan Gillen), has the aura of a chartered accountant at the end of a bad day rather than a criminal patriarch, while Sam Keeley, as family hothead Eric, appears to have wandered in from Dublin ComicCon as a Conor McGregor cosplayer.

As before, the most rounded character is Michael, a conflicted killer portrayed with scorched-earth empathy by Daredevil’s Charlie Cox. He’s on the run and hiding out in the sticks as the dust settles.

Clare Dunne as Amanda in Kin. Photograph: RTÉ

Cox is a top-tier actor and the producers of Kin – which will also air on US streamer AMC + – are to be commended for persuading him to return. However, the show suffers from the absence of Ciarán Hinds as the brutal Cunningham. He fought through the archetypes from which his Cunningham had been woven and arrived at a place of bulldozing menace.

It’s a cliche to say a city is a “character” in a TV series but the best shows – from The Wire to Breaking Bad – are rooted in their setting. In Kin, Dublin is a glorified screensaver. Relocate it to Dundee, Detroit or Dingle, and what would change? There is no sense of the city as anything other than a moody backdrop as the Kinsellas bumble in the gloom. It looks great but style only goes so far and, two seasons in, Kin’s lack of substance is impossible to ignore

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