The construction of the glass structure where Hillary Clinton would eventually concede the 2016 election might not seem like the stuff of gripping television. And indeed, it isn’t—at least not in *The Westies*, the MGM+ drama about how the Irish gang of the same name tried to cash in on the building of the Javits Center at the far end of Manhattan. Despite featuring veteran actors like J.K. Simmons and Titus Welliver—playing a local crime boss and the corrupt cop in his pocket, respectively—*The Westies* fails to offer a fresh perspective within a well-worn genre.
Oscar winner J.K. Simmons plays Eamon Sweeney, a Hell’s Kitchen kingpin looking to turn the Javits project into a lucrative revenue stream for his associates: an interchangeable crew of young thugs with names like Sean and Connor. Sweeney’s plans require coming to terms with the Italian Mafia, which vastly outnumbers his dwindling gang; among them is an up-and-coming, skeptical John Gotti (Hamish Allan-Headley), the most obvious reminder that *The Westies* is (loosely) based on a real organization.
Creators: Chris Brancato, Michael Panes
Stars: Rohan Mead, Will Jeffs, Maria Dinn
(If only *The Westies* were as spectacularly terrible as the 2018 biopic starring John Travolta as Gotti; instead, it is simply dull.) But the scheme hinges on an impulsive group of violent thugs maintaining discipline and on subordinates like Jimmy Roarke—Sweeney’s protégé, played by Tom Brittney, who sports a pair of distracting sideburns—trusting his judgment.
Creators Chris Brancato and Michael Panes, who previously collaborated on the network’s series *Godfather of Harlem*, could have leveraged the 1980s setting of *The Westies* to make more concrete observations about the story’s time and place. The Javits Center—currently the home of New York Comic Con and other events—symbolizes both opportunity and displacement during the twilight of the Irish-American population as a distinct ethnic bloc with its own physical enclaves. (By the time the Reagan administration arrived, the assimilation process had already been underway for several generations.) Yet, rather than adopting the melancholic tone of *The Sopranos*—with Tony’s famous declaration that "I came in at the end"—*The Westies* simply feels dated in its focus on Irish brawlers; it is as if the Jets from *West Side Story* had kept fighting for another twenty years and moved their battleground a few blocks south. The rise of Colombian cocaine and other hard drugs nods to the changing times, however superficially.
Nor does *The Westies* boast the immersive production design of recent projects like HBO’s *The Deuce*, which recreated the porn-era Times Square in all its sordid glory. (It doesn't help that filming took place in Ontario, depriving the work of authentic local texture.) Most of the thematic relevance comes from Bridget (Sarah Bolger), Jimmy’s girlfriend and a former IRA fighter who rejoins the struggle when her former comrade Brendan (Allen Leech) reappears on the scene. However, viewers seeking a nuanced portrayal of the Northern Ireland conflict ("The Troubles") would be far better off watching *Say Nothing* (2024) than this tangential subplot.
But the biggest problem with *The Westies* is a serious lack of compelling protagonists. Sweeney is the quintessential cold-blooded pragmatist who does not hesitate to kill one of his own for disobeying orders, just as he does in the opening scene. Their logic is undoubtedly more convincing than Jimmy’s blind loyalty to unpredictable figures like Mickey Flanagan (Stanley Morgan)—a traumatized Vietnam veteran who has no business handling a weapon, yet does so with predictably disastrous results. Even so, *The Westies* seems to lean more toward Jimmy’s tribal loyalty, even when that tribe consists of killers and thieves who offer no real reason to prefer them over those of other ethnicities.
Welliver’s Glenn Keenan, for instance, is not merely a corrupt cop reluctantly recruited by the FBI for a special task force targeting the Gambino crime family. He is also an alcoholic and an absentee father whose redemption is a hard sell—even when the person trying to pull it off is Harry Bosch himself. By the time Danny (Aidan Wojtak-Hissong), Glenn’s teenage son, begs him for the umpteenth time to simply walk away and stop trying to fix things too late in the game, one cannot help but nod in agreement. The same applies to the rest of the group: at best, *The Westies* elicits indifference from the viewer regarding whether Sweeney’s gang manages to pocket.
Simmons’s booming voice and the charm evident in his eyes remain intact, even beneath a vaguely period-appropriate newsboy cap. (After all, Sweeney is old-school; it’s not as if he’d be wearing Armani suits.) However, *The Westies* fails to translate his appeal into the language of prestige TV in a particularly compelling way—unlike the short-lived sci-fi series *Counterpart*—nor does it skillfully position him as the amoral veteran mentor to an ambitious young protégé, in the vein of his Oscar-winning role in *Whiplash*. It is simply a crime drama about a group of uninteresting criminals whose dying way of life offers no cause for regret.
The first two episodes of *The Westies* premiere on MGM+ on July 12 at 9 p.m. ET, with subsequent episodes airing weekly on Sundays.
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