You know that discourse around toxic masculinity is reaching the heart of the mainstream when it starts underpinning primetime crime dramas. And while the conflicted emotional openness of Liverpudlian gangster Michael Kavanagh (James Nelson-Joyce) isn’t the dominant theme of the BBC’s gripping new Sunday night thriller This City is Ours, it is a distinct subplot.
Michael, as the opening episode makes clear, would still beat you to death, wrap your body in a tarpaulin and dump you in a lake if the circumstances demanded it. But he would probably be worrying about his reproductive capacities (“Not only have I got a low sperm count, but the fellas I’m firing can’t even swim”) and pondering the feelings of his partner as she began a course of IVF as he did so. Can this hint of submerged sensitivity survive a gangland season in hell?
Michael, it becomes clear, is good at compartmentalising. He’s built a cocaine empire with his boss Ronnie (Sean Bean; a Yorkshireman puzzlingly adrift in a sea of Scousers). Michael runs the ground game ruthlessly, but utilises his milder, shrewder side when negotiating with his firm’s continental contacts. And he’s every inch the expressive, affectionate new man in his relationship with Diana (Hannah Onslow), a woman who otherwise seems alienated by her surroundings, floundering at the point of overlap between Michael’s violent paranoid professional world and his less violent but equally paranoid matrix of personal relationships. The inconvenient thing about organised crime gangs is you can’t really trust them, even when they’re your mates. Certain versions of masculinity – particularly those tied up with power and money – are immune to the slightest suggestion of change.
This City is Ours dramatises the explosive results when these contexts collide. “Why don’t you just walk away?” asks Diana plaintively. If only it were that simple. All of a sudden, things aren’t looking good for Michael. Despite his essential unreliability contrasting unfavourably with Michael’s ruthless competence, Ronnie’s son Jamie is forging ahead in the succession stakes, as Ronnie begins to consider sacking it all off and heading for the Costa Del Wirral. And worse still, there’s a rat in the organisation.
Michael has an idea who it might be. He also has the gang’s suppliers in his corner – touchingly, they seem charmed by him having bothered to learn a smattering of Spanish and the fact he shows them Diana’s IVF scans. But as far as Ronnie is concerned, blood is thicker than water. So it seems that while Michael can’t readily walk away, he can’t easily stick around either. Cue a narrative that simmers with menace, the jeopardy growing with each evasion and betrayal.
Up to now, Nelson-Joyce has mainly played intimidating but one-dimensional bad boys. He has loomed, sneered, and scowled convincingly, and that has been enough. His performance as Johnno, the terrifying nemesis of Sean Bean’s tormented prisoner in Jimmy McGovern’s 2021 drama Time, was fairly typical. This role, though, asks a lot more of him. Happily, he delivers. There’s plenty about these gangsters that feels familiar; even cliched. The boss, with his studied avuncularity, flashes of rage and quasi-religious attitude towards family loyalty. His underlings, poised like coiled springs in their flash docklands apartments, waiting for signs of weakness. But the relationship between Michael and Diana elevates the piece. To the credit of both actors, it feels real.
This realness manifests as vulnerability, and it raises the narrative stakes considerably. Even as she’s longing to have his children, Diana is constantly trying to decide if her love for Michael is worth the risks. The other women within the organisation distrust the apparent purity of the couple’s relationship – it’s a note of depth in a superficial world and as such, it’s a reproach too. For all the toxicity around them, Diana has sensed something tender in Michael. At one point, she’s cornered at a family christening by Saoirse-Monica Jackson’s slightly despairing Cheryl. “There’s nothing good about our men,” she warns drunkenly; her face suggests she has learnt this fact the hard way.
Diana isn’t quite ready to accept this verdict and it’s this battle – not for a criminal empire but for a relationship – that gives the series a distinctive tone. At one point, Diana asks Michael if he’s ever killed anyone. “Is that a dealbreaker?” he responds, guardedly. Not necessarily, it seems. But maybe it should be. And the looks on their faces suggest they both know it. In a world of boilerplate crime dramas populated by cookie-cutter criminals, this willingness to embrace moral ambivalence prevents This City is Ours from feeling like more of the same.
