City on a Hill

Your appreciation will rise and fall on your enjoyment of seeing Boston and its people portrayed as profoundly racist and corrupt.

Showrunner Tom Fontana, whose previous series include the iconic St. Elsewhere and Homicide, knows how to commandeer a sprawling cast and story. But in City on a Hill there’s too much silliness to rein in and too many clichés to overcome.

The actual heisting is kept to a minimum, but there’s still a thrill in the inexorability that haunts Frankie and Jimmy’s scenes.

The performances and production values may be enough to keep you around to see whether the story picks up steam, and whether MacLean finds more original ways to shape his ideas into drama. “City on a Hill” keeps threatening to be interesting and exciting, but so far it hasn’t pulled off the job.

The series starts from a relatively rich premise. ... Even as the aperture expands, little gets better: the show’s broad view of a city of wrongdoers and accomplices features many familiar types (from sad-eyed Irish brothers in crime to Rohr’s long-suffering wife, played by a poorly-used Jill Hennessy) and little sense of what life in this particular place is really like. Hodge is, by far, the best thing about the show, blending rectitude with real sorrow and moral confusion.

Jerks have all the fun--or at least that's how it seems in a '90s-set drama that, despite thick Boston accents and local color, is as generic as its title and twice as cliched. [24 Jun - 7 Jul 2019, p.11]