Lowlife, Civil War-era Manhattan takes center stage on BBC America’s ambitious drama.
BBC America’s first scripted series, Copper, is set in 1864 New York, it’s a tale of emerging identities.
From Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana, the series has an impressive pedigree (Homicide: Life on the Street, Oz), plus ambition, and BBC America clearly hopes to make a splash in the scripted world.
Kevin Corcoran (Tom Weston-Jones) is an Irish-American detective -- a “copper” -- who returns from the Civil War to find that his daughter has been murdered and his wife has disappeared. He’s seeking justice and the truth in their cases as he also tries to keep the wildly untamed Five Points area of New York in line. It’s a dark, dank part of the city, with mud and rot everywhere. People are poor and homeless, drunk and dangerous, and it appears that the Wild West has moved east. Whorehouses and bars do brisk business, most disputes are settled with violence, and Corcoran is in the employ of police who appear to be as crooked as the crooks.
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Dylan Taylor, Tom Weston-Jones and Kevin Ryan
That’s not to say that Corcoran is the hero. Like the rest of the coppers, he’s a “shoot first and figure it out after they’re dead” type of guy. He is sort of loyal to Eva (Franka Potente), the madam of Eva’s Paradise, and apparently his new love, though it’s hard to say that loyalty is really his game at this point. He’s aided in his detective duties by Francis Maguire (Kevin Ryan) and Andrew O’Brien (Dylan Taylor), two Irish cops who have his back. However, all three are worried about their less-than-pure superiors, Padraic Byrnes (David Keeley) and Ciaran Joseph Sullivan (Ron White), who like the graft and do whatever favors the New York powers require.
But Corcoran has a link to that upper-crust world as well. One of the men who served with him in the war was aristocrat Robert Morehouse (Kyle Schmid), who had his leg amputated (saving his life) by his African-American valet, Matthew Freeman (Ato Essandoh), who now secretly works with Corcoran as a doctor to find out how murders occurred. The three men apparently consider one another equals, much to the dismay of Morehouse’s powerful father, who has been buying up much of New York.
And so viewers are being presented with a fairly vast canvas: the emergence of a city and all of its social structures in particular and America in general. It’s a big bite to take, particularly when the first two episodes focus more acutely on a murder mystery involving a young girl. Tim.Goodman@THR.com
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/copper-bbc-tv-review-362850
http://www.bbcamerica.com/copper/
