“I consider myself in charge of the scumbag universe,” the writer Chris Brancato said with a laugh last week over coffee. “Any criminal group of any sort that emanates out of New York is fair game for me to try to fictionalize.”
Strictly speaking, he was selling himself short. For the past few decades, his scumbags have come also from Medellín, Colombia (“Narcos”); Guadalajara, Mexico (“Narcos: Mexico”); and Miami (“Hotel Cocaine”), among other places. (It wasn’t the inevitable path for someone whose first writing credit came on “Beverly Hills, 90210.”)
Brancato’s latest series, “The Westies,” which debuted Sunday on MGM+, fits more squarely with his description. A quasi extension of the historical fiction series “Godfather of Harlem,” which he cocreated and oversaw for MGM+, it centers on the west Manhattan neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen, where the small but brutal Irish gang of its title holds outsize sway.
The series, created by Brancato and Michael Panes, begins in 1980 as a huge new development project, the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, is underway, funneling hundreds of millions of skimmable dollars into the neighborhood. Outmatched and out-disciplined by the Italian mob, the Westies, led by the unflappable Eamon Sweeney (J.K. Simmons), nevertheless have their fingers in every local pot, forcing the Italians, including an ambitious young John Gotti (Hamish Allan-Headley), to form an uneasy and unstable alliance with the Irish.
“The Irish at the time, in the ’70s and ’80s, were known for scams that involved construction and bid-rigging and no-show jobs,” Brancato said. For starters, the Irish controlled some of the local unions.
“The Italians knew that this project that was being built square on the Irish home turf,” he added. “They weren’t going to be able to just push them out.”
The partnership was far from tidy, however, particularly given the unruliness of the Westies, who strained the definition of “organized crime.” Complicating matters are drug kingpins from Harlem, cocaine traffickers from South America and arms smugglers from the Provisional Irish Republican Army. (The early ’80s were bloody years in the conflict in Northern Ireland known as the Troubles).
Then there is the law enforcement, which includes an F.B.I. task force and a dirty Irish cop played by Titus Welliver, who is forced to regrow a long-dormant conscience.
Brancato, 63, who oversees the series, spoke at a cafe in the West Village in Manhattan about the origins of the show, his abiding fascination with criminal empires and why the Westies were even harder than most criminals to make into likable characters. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
I’ve read that “The Westies” has its origins in “Godfather of Harlem.” How are the two related?
“The Westies” came about because on “Godfather of Harlem,” I’m always looking for a New York-based criminal group to put against Forest Whitaker’s character, Bumpy Johnson. So I said to [Michael Wright, the head of MGM+], “Hey, for the fourth season, I’m thinking about the 1960s Westies confronting Bumpy.” And he said: “Oh, man. I would do a whole show about the Westies.” When someone who runs a channel says to you, “Oh, I would do a whole show about that,” you say, “Yes, sir.”
Right. “Let me start writing.”
“Let me get on that.”
Are you ultimately creating a kind of Historical Violent Criminal-verse for MGM+, with fictional crossover characters and the like?
[Laughs.] I love that analogy. It’s sort of like the Marvel universe.
But with some distinct challenges …
In reality, the Westies were really an extremely violent, whiskey-soaked group of criminals who don’t have a lot of redeeming qualities in my estimation. And one of the tasks with writing a crime show is you need to create a point-of-view character or characters that the audience is going to root for above all others. Essentially, the audience has to sort of excuse their violence. Otherwise, we won’t like them, and we won’t want to watch.
So how did you try to humanize the Westies?
It was about making a generational divide within the Westies to create drama internally. But it was also creating conflict with the Gambino family, for whom they are working nominally as partners. We make the Italians worse than the Irish in terms of their greed and criminality, so that when you’re watching the whole thing, you’re saying, “Oh, I hope the Westies end up on top here.”
Why ask people to root for criminals in the first place?
I grew up in Teaneck, N.J. — a suburban boy — and have very little connection to the crime that I write about. But those are the shows I always loved to watch, and I think we all like to watch them for a number of different reasons. One of them is it’s fun to see people who are willing to cross societal boundaries that we ourselves wouldn’t cross. So there’s a voyeuristic aspect to watching criminality play itself out.
The industry has changed so much lately. How do you know a show is worth pursuing for the long haul when you’re up against the algorithm?
I try not to think too much about that stuff. It’s more when I mention to people, “Here’s the show I’m working on,” [what is] their initial reaction? With “The Westies,” it’s strange: When describing it at first, I said, “It’s the American ‘Peaky Blinders.’” And I was surprised at how many people, if they hadn’t heard of the Westies, were interested in this Irish gang in New York. Or if they had heard of the Westies, they were interested in seeing them represented.
Historically, weren’t they very small?
The Westies in reality were only about 20 guys — this tiny, tiny group who had this outsize influence on the criminal world in New York for a couple of different reasons. First, they were incredibly brutal. The Italians would want somebody whacked, but they wouldn’t want it coming back to their doorstep, so they would contract the Westies to go do the hit. And the Westies were also experts because a few of them worked in the butchery trade. They were experts at disappearing bodies.
That makes sense given the way we see that one guy get chopped up — but I don’t want to spoil anything, so I’ll just leave it there.
[Laughs.] Yeah, we had some fun with that aspect of it — the rubber dummies and the cutting of arms.
So we’re not being entirely asked to excuse the violence after all. We also kind of like it, don’t we?
Yeah, it’s human nature, I think. We have violence within us, whether we express it or not, and so sometimes to see it play out is enjoyable.
It also goes to the transgression thing you mentioned. We’ve all been cut off at an intersection and wanted to punch someone. So when a guy actually does it, there’s something satisfying about that.
Yeah, there is. In some ways, the characters are playing out our own internal fantasies, and we would like to be tough and not allow societal strictures to tie us down.
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