This City Is Ours

This was an amazingly acted and perfectly written series with great pacing. Sean Bean is a reliable familiar face and the rest of the cast were excellent. James Nelson-Joyce is someone I only recognised from Time (also with Sean Bean) but he really carries the show with his gritty and believable performance. The series feels quite similar to Top Boy in some ways, but with a Liverpool setting.

It is a very suspenseful watch and I absolutely binged through it, hooked from episode 1 right through to the end of the series. I really really really hope they make a second season! This show deserves more hype!

There was not much hype surrounding this shows release as far as I could tell, so, my surprise binge made it all the more pleasurable. Here is the Gist...Liverpool drug kingpins Ronnie and Michael are always looking to broaden their margins, money wise. Enter the Columbians, located in Spain. This is just an aside to all the other drama. Michael ( a fantastic James Nelson-Joyce) and his girlfriend Diana are trying to conceive. Jamie, the son of Ronnie ( Sean Bean), is like AJ Soprano ( Tony's son), but more useless and way more volatile. After an incident, Jamie wants more power. He also has his own little Band of Thieves, who are as useless and more dangerous than him. While Jamie's fiance wants to live in Dubai (?!) with their baby. Shout out to A very scary Bobby Shofield, as Bonehead, crazy excellent.

Drama really stretches across these 8 episodes...Including a great side plot with, Saoirse-Monica Jackson from " Derry Girls". It's not just drugs and Mobsters here. It's a really great series written/ created by Stephen Butchard. Foreshadow, Episode 8 at the 43 minute mark, is insanely brilliant.

I was really looking forward to watching this, especially being written by the same guy who wrote The Last Kingdom (if you've not seen it watch it, absolutely brilliant from start to finish).

I digress. If you're wanting flowers and hearts this isn't for you, however if you like a good northern drama you will love it.

I don't believe in giving any kind of spoilers so all I can say is it has a kickass soundtrack. The cast choices are perfect Julie Graham is a really good choice for the Matriarch and Sean Bean even with his Yorkshire accent (thee knows nowt Jon Snow) as a scouser well he can be forgiven. Jack McMullen (Waterloo Road) is a real header, somewhat unpredictable character. An actor I don't recall seeing before is James Nelson-Joyce who again puts in a solid performance.

I have watched the whole season in 2 nights and will be watching it again.

Professionally put together, none of the OTT scouse kidda la la acting.

Really nicely done, some top heavy actors involved, exactly how you'd expect businessmen to conduct themselves, it's about time someone made a decent Liverpool based mob film as this is where the majority of the big players operate.

Absolutely gripping from start to finish, the plot isn't easily sussed out.

Stephen Butchard take a bow son!

James Nelson-Joyce is a diamond level actor, Hannah Onslow is a classy, sophisticated Gangsters Mol with a hidden past.

The cast has been very well selected, I hope to see much more from this series, I can't get enough!

This is a must watch!

I'll cut to the chase: I don't know why so few people have realised it, but this series is a (very loose) adaptation of William Shakespeare's Macbeth. It's so loose that after 8 hours we're basically up to the end of act 2, but it's still Macbeth in spirit. My guess is that the series' creator Stephen Butchard originally wrote an adaptation of Macbeth set in his native Liverpool, but somewhere along the line it got expanded into a whole epic drama about Scouse gangsters and their families.

And you know what? It's all the better for that. Lots of people have done modern adaptations of Shakespeare plots, but mixing them up with really believable modern characters and situations is a lot harder, and We Own This City mostly pulls it off.

Thanks to some unfortunate family connections I've spent some time around the fringes of Liverpool criminals, and this seems pretty true to their weird subculture. My only criticisms would be that the series doesn't fully represent the extreme poverty a lot of Scouse gangsters come from. The reason some of these people will hurt and even kill people for money is that they grew up without any and were exposed to enormous suffering as a result. There are some scenes filmed in poor areas, but the show never really dives into how grim things are for a lot of people. It would really help develop the characters if we saw more of where they came from.

It also sort of underplays the insane drinking culture in Liverpool. A lot of violence happens because people are off their faces much of the time. A couple of characters are criticised for drinking too much, but it's not really explained how normalised the excessive drinking is to a lot of people.

Anyway, this is a really good British gangster drama, and much more realistic and better written than most contributions to the genre. I think I know how it'll all pan out because... I've read Macbeth (duh). But I know that season 2 will be enjoyable whether or not it conforms to my expectations.