This City Is Ours, review: superb crime thriller of betrayals and shifting loyalties

Telegraph

23-03-2025

You've got to hand it to Sean Bean: he's absolutely committed to his own accent. In This City Is Ours (BBC One), he plays the boss of a Liverpool crime family. The show has already been dubbed the Scouse Sopranos, and everyone else in the cast is either a real-life Scouser or has put considerable effort into sounding like one. And then there's Bean, happily sticking with his South Yorkshire brogue, which the writers explain away in the first scene with a reference to Sheffield steel.
Anyway, of course this show isn't as good as The Sopranos, so let's dispense with that comparison. But it's cracking. I binged all eight episodes in two days, and I'm not a big fan of dramas about drugs and guns.
It's a tense crime thriller of betrayals and shifting loyalties, but it's also about family dynamics and the day-to-day of running a successful business when that business happens to be dealing in shipments of cocaine. This line of work buys nice houses, expensive garden furniture and shiny Range Rovers. There's a Love Island-style villa in Spain and days on the golf course. The glamorous WAGs acknowledge where the money comes from and turn a blind eye to the less salubrious aspects. Life can be fun when everything is going to plan: see the family christening where everyone gets dolled up and, a little surreally, perform a choreographed dance routine to House of Bamboo by Andy Williams. This isn't a humourless drama.
Things have ticked along nicely with Ronnie Phelan (Bean) steering the ship, aided by his capable right-hand man, Michael Kavanagh (James Nelson-Joyce). Trouble comes in the form of Ronnie's son, Jamie (Jack McMullen), a loose cannon whose jealousy of Michael, combined with his lack of brains or impulse control, sparks a power struggle which is not going to end well. People begin to take sides; do they fall in behind Jamie because he's a Phelan, or stick with Michael because he knows what he's doing?
One of the things that makes this series so strong is the way that supporting players, including Julie Graham, come into their own as the story progresses, from middle-ranking crew members (Mike Noble and Kevin Harvey are especially good) to Derry Girls' Saoirse-Monica Jackson as a troubled wife on the fringes of the firm. Bean is the headline name but he's not the star of the show. That honour goes to Nelson-Joyce, a magnetic actor whose striking features give him the look of a puma on the prowl. Michael wants the top job one day while also yearning for a normal domestic life with his girlfriend, Diana (Hannah Onslow).
Yes, some of the themes are a bit clichéd, but Nelson-Joyce's performance cuts through and all of the characters behave like real human beings, helped by writer Stephen Butchard's authentic dialogue. You can build up your Scouse slang dictionary as you go: 'lemo' is cocaine, a 'straightener' is sorting out a dispute through an old-fashioned fight. It all builds to an operatic climax – unlike The Sopranos, there's no doubt about who lives to fight another day.