Most of my favourite TV shows seem to involve gangsters in one way or another: The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Top Boy, The Offer (that brilliant series on Paramount+ about the making of The Godfather), series two of The White Lotus, Suburra, Gomorrah; even, you could argue, Game of Thrones (cod-medieval fantasy gangsters with dragons) and Succession (gangsters who don’t need to use guns).
It’s the first thing in ages where I’ve been salivating to watch the next episode
Perhaps there’s something lightly psychopathic about being so allured by a genre which celebrates relentless, brutal killing, where the forces of law and order and civilisation are the enemy, and where the business model is to get stupidly rich at the expense of the desperately poor, addicted and hopeless. But I can’t be the only viewer with this vice, or TV execs wouldn’t keep commissioning stuff like Kin (originally on BBC1; second season now starting on Netflix).
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