“City On a Hill” 2019-2022 Streaming Series, Seasons 1-3
There have been a long string of films about Boston – its
corruption, its racism, its Catholic Church, its cops. The
Departed, Mystic River, Southie, The Town, Black Mass, What Doesn’t Kill You,
Edge of Darkness, Spotlight, Boondock Saints and on and on. This series tries to do to Boston what The Wire did for Baltimore, but this
series is more theatrical and sensational.
I spent the summer of 1975 in Boston during the busing crisis, and saw
it’s racism up close and personal. So some of this is not exaggerated, especially the blockheads in Southie. The phrase “City on a Hill” is meant to be
a sarcastic reference to U.S. exceptionalism and the 1988 “Shining City on a
Hill” quote by Reagan that white-washed the U.S.
Former Bostonians Ben Affleck and Matt Damon (of course...) produced City on a Hill, piggy-backing on this
image of Boston. It’s a ‘star vehicle’
for Kevin Bacon, who gets to play wise-cracking, coke-sniffing, book-quoting,
rule-breaking, slime-ball FBI agent Jackie Rohr. He’s hilarious, the last throw-back to the corrupt
“Whitey Bolger” Boston FBI era and probably the best role he’s ever played.
In fact every character in this series is heavily flawed
like Rohr, leading you to think that perhaps being fucked-up is the new
standard. Almost no one even approaches some
kind of normality. Being an asshole or
stupid seems to be the baseline.
The first season focuses on the Ryans, a ‘working-class’
family of Charleston armored-car robbers who attempt a normal family life while
shooting people. The husband works at a
grocery store stocking shelves when he’s not knocking off guards. The wife is even more vicious, a nasty,
drug-dealing beauty who runs a failing hair salon. The man’s brother is a double-dealing loose
cannon who is as erratic as a druggie – which he is. Every Charlestown thug is
Catholic and wears a cross, though they are not aware of the irony. The excuse for everyone is that they need the money.
The second season is about the Campbells, a family in the Roxbury housing projects, led by a ‘saintly’
mother and activist who covers for her deadly, gang-banging older son and his younger
brother. The joke of the mom who never
admits her children are bad news is all over this portrayal. This self-righteous family parades around
with prayers, crosses and preachers too as the bodies fall. This tack on
community activists will certainly make right-wingers happy. The excuse by the sons is that they want to give "Momma" nice things. So some kind of poverty is the tie that binds Boston's working-class together.
The third season involves a wealthy, retired ex-FBI scion
living in Beacon Hill who drugs and rapes young women, even to the point of
overdose. He’s a smug shit with a
skanky, money-hungry wife who tolerates his behavior.
On the color side of the class divide is a professional dark-skinned husband and wife, who are both upscale lawyers living in ritzy downtown Boston. The husband, DeCourcy Ward, is built like a buff action hero and never seems to really be the ‘professional’ Assistant DA he is portrayed as. Everyone in this story insults each other on the job, bosses and underlings included - and he joins in. How a DA’s office could function like this is dubious. He has a love/hate working relationship with Rohr, but they are sometimes able to work together, as Rohr teaches Ward how to work 'off the book.' Ward's beautiful wife (of course) also never really strikes one as an attorney, especially in her pursuit of a “Big Dig” construction company for injuries suffered by a Latino worker. No facts or cause of action is evident in this vague story. They are both liberal nationalist crusaders for ‘our community’ against police corruption and “the blue code of silence.” Yet at one point they end up on opposite sides of a criminal case. This series is set in the early 1990s but riffs off the BLM activism of the last years.
Rohr’s domestic Catholic wife, Jenny, is the saddest of
all. Brow-beaten and two-timed, she’s a
timid stay-at-home mom in Quincy who attempts to become herself, actually looking
to Catholic Church pastors for direction.
She and Jackie have the typical angry teen-age daughter who, after being
gang-raped and into drugs, turns her life around and becomes the only sane one
in the family. Clueless Jennifer
understands the world so little that she naively loans money to an IRA woman
for weapons … something her husband spares her the knowledge of.
There is also a cast of corrupt and killer Boston cops, one
or two honest ones, a rude FBI boss, a paternalistic political DA, a bi-sexual
Catholic priest associated with the IRA, old and abusive working-class mothers,
a lost pedophile father, corrupt OSHA inspectors, a seductress, gun-runners, drug
dealers, gang bangers, union thugs, FBI informers, police wives and Walpole
prison hanging over it all.
 |
| Dream On |
This series is a picture of a decaying, cynical place full
of poverty, corruption and crime. The
actual working-class is somewhat invisible.
Everyone lies, even while on the stand in court. The Charlestown ‘proletarians’ are
lumpenized. There are no African American workers portrayed. “Activists” are shown to be a crew of hypocrites
or ineffectual soft-touches. Nearly everyone's scared stiff of someone. The ‘good
guys’ are flawed or heavily flawed. The use of music is great, especially in
Jackie’s car as he roams around the city like a feral animal - so you will catch the Standells and even Boston. Bacon is what
hangs this series together and it’s worth watching for him alone. But this collection of sad cases bodes ill for
any social progress at all if you took this as a real representative slice of human
Boston… which it is not. The series also
feeds the illusion that ‘the law’ will somehow clean up the city. It will not.
Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box,
upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms: “Boston
Marathon,” “Revolution in the Air,” “The Terror Factory,” “April Morning,”
“Handmaid’s Tale,” “The Given Day.”
The Cultural Marxist
September 17, 2022
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