Love it or hate it, this really was a TV classic
I NEVER thought I’d say it, but Netflix is getting wearisome. Maybe it’s the three months of quarantine, or perhaps just sofa fatigue from constant binge adventures with shows like ‘Money Heist’ and ‘The Sinner.’ Either way, it was a fortuitous moment when my aimless channel hopping took me to the familiar precincts of RTÉ and a walk down memory lane with ‘Love/Hate’ – a crime drama that really kills it. Criminality always charms us because the stakes are so high – life and death, good versus evil, drawing us into dangerous worlds from the comfort of our sofas.
We gorge on robbery and murder safe in the knowledge we can return to our normal lives when the credits roll.
Set around a gangland milieu of dilapidated housing estates, strip clubs, backstreet bordellos and after-hours drinking dens, ‘Love/ Hate’ led writer Stuart Carolan into a world unfamiliar to most of the population.
Needing to immerse himself in criminal lifestyle, he started with the Facebook and Bebo pages of dead gangland members – only to discover a world not so different to the rest of us.
“Despite what they had done or how they had died, their families were like anybody’s, but constantly on the move and on the phone.”
In the myriad of adulatory reviews, the writing’s ‘honesty’ was frequently cited, presenting characters in a state of transformational flux, swaying between delirium and disaster.
Yet, while the series exploited many of the criminal toys displayed on similar shows like ‘Breaking Bad’ and ‘The Wire’ – Glock pistols, AK-47 machine guns and mountains of cocaine – it was the twisted humour that gave it a distinctly Irish edge.
Take your pick: Between Nidge viewing YouTube tutorials on gun maintenance, Wayne putting a bullet in an innocent moggy, Tommy asking his Garda captors for “a fizzy orange”, or brothel madam Janet demanding “a cushion for me aching knees” while intimately engaged with a client.
And though it expressed a fictional world of chaos and destruction, what made ‘Love/Hate’ so compelling – and it still retains a decade later – is its similarity to the real-life gangland wars making media headlines most weeks of the year.
“We’re soldiers,” Tony Soprano explained of the criminal vocation. “We’re in a situation where everyone involved knows the stakes, and if you are going to accept those stakes, you’ve got to do certain things. It’s business.”
It was a directive Aidan Gillen’s kingpin John Boy took to heart – cunning, amoral and ruthless in pursuit of power.
Love it or hate it, this is one show better the second time around.