Jason Clarke’s Brotherhood was a TV masterpiece of family and culture

Before Showtime was huge and Jason Clarke was a star, there was Brotherhood, one of the best TV series of all time. Discover it in this week’s Deeper Cut.

Ten years ago, the world was very different. Showtime had just begun to put itself on the map, Jason Clarke had yet to become the star of movies like Pet Sematary and Zero Dark Thirty, and Brotherhood was airing its third and final season.

Except most people likely don’t remember the last one, and thus missed out on one of the best TV programs ever made, as we’ll explore in the latest Deeper Cut.

Brotherhood came along well before its time. In 2006, when the show premiered, Showtime was not the powerhouse name in original series that it is today. Queer as Folk had finished its run the year before, and The L Word and Weeds were still relatively young. Dexter, the series that would become the network’s best known product, hadn’t even started yet.

Enter a cast and creative team led by relative unknowns. Series creator Blake Masters had never done TV before. Jason Isaacs had, but he’d never been a regular on an American TV show. As for Jason Clarke, he hadn’t been on any show for more than seven episodes, and Brotherhood was his breakout role.

They were new blood, a fresh injection of energy and talent, while also taking the time to surround themselves with experienced veterans like producer Henry Bromell and actors such as Annabeth Gish, Kevin Chapman and Fionnula Flanagan. And the story they told, well, it was pretty fitting as it was also a story of making one’s own way in the world—and done in a way that hasn’t been seen before or since.

Brotherhood intertwined everything that one could want in a drama—family, politics, crime, the pursuit of power and the American dream. In the blue-collar city of Providence, Tommy Caffee (Clarke) was a state politician just trying to do well by his city and his family. But then his brother Michael (Isaacs), a gangster long presumed dead, arrived back in town with his own idea of the future, and all hell soon broke loose.

That included Tommy’s unfaithful wife Eileen (Gish), the brothers’ childhood friend turned cop Declan (Ethan Embry), the local gang boss (Chapman), and the family matriarch (Flanagan). The series touched every aspect of the characters’ lives, and explored every theme that could come up in between. There really hasn’t been storytelling as comprehensive as there was in Brotherhood, perhaps because it dared to go further than the basic setups of most TV series.

There have been lots of TV shows about families, and many shows about crime or politics, and a few where those cross paths. There are a ridiculous amount of shows that feature protagonists with professional ambitions and personal disasters. But Brotherhood wasn’t just about Tommy and Michael, and it went beyond its compelling good son vs. bad son dynamic. In fact, each was the good one and the bad one over the course of three seasons.

Its title meant more than that. It represented the family, but also the bond of the working-class community in Providence, even as the city changed and the country changed around it. It meant the unspoken loyalty that was supposed to be between the criminal players, even though it was sometimes lacking. It was, ultimately, the story of a city and its people told through characters who represented every different facet—as they pushed back against each other, influenced one another, and came together for a common goal.

What Blake Masters and Henry Bromell were able to do with Brotherhood was establish a great dichotomy—the one brother who had done well, started a family, and was serving his city versus the one who had gotten involved in crime, was a lone wolf, and seemed to be out for no one but himself. In the first episode alone, Tommy negotiated a backroom deal to keep a highway spur off of The Hill, while Michael…cut off the ear of a thug who dared to attack a woman.

But while they and their writers played the opposites, they also tore down those walls and very quickly established the similarities. Tommy’s perfect life wasn’t so perfect; his wife was cheating on him, and the family’s bills were mounting, and his own ambitions had long gone unfulfilled. Meanwhile, Michael had his own moral code that he followed, and his interest wasn’t just in making money; it was in shaping the community, just like his brother.

By episode two, audiences were wise to the fact that the Caffee brothers were both very different and also very alike. Both were consistently true, in what was an incredible (and incredibly nuanced) balancing act.

Great writing requires great performers, however, and Brotherhood succeeded because it not only had excellent actors—it had actors that viewers had never seen before, or had never seen the way the show presented them. They were either working without expectations or completely defying them, and because they weren’t the usual suspects, everything they did was fresh and involving and, most of all, intense.

Who’d have thought that Ethan Embry, who’d played the happy-go-lucky characters in Empire Records and Can’t Hardly Wait, would be so fantastic as a jaded state trooper? Or that Annabeth Gish, just a few years removed from playing Monica Reyes on The X-Files, would be here getting high and sleeping with the mailman?

The actors truly were able to spread their wings, none more so than Isaacs and Clarke. It’s not lost that they were playing the epitome of working-class America while neither were really American. Isaacs is British and Clarke is Australian, but you wouldn’t know it from how they nailed the accents and just the way they lived in their characters’ skin. And both of them, like all of the cast members, took on their roles with both hands.

Every scene in Brotherhood had an intense energy about it, so honest and powerful, because that’s how real the whole series felt. Especially when it was just Tommy and Michael together; you’ve never seen a better double act in all of television. They were forces of nature, and this show remains a force to watch, a decade after it was quietly cancelled.

If anything, Brotherhood has aged even better over the last few years. In today’s America, with the current political turbulence and the discontent of the middle class, its themes are almost more impactful today than they were in 2009. But what’s also still true is its fundamental message: that there’s a brotherhood between everyone in a community, whether they see it or not.

This series said so much about the world we live in, in such a beautiful way, and it’s a shame that it’s fallen out of memory because of when it was on the air. Brotherhood should never be forgotten; it is as powerful and engrossing as anything that’s been made since. And if you haven’t seen it, you haven’t truly seen TV.

All three seasons of Brotherhood are now streaming on Amazon Video. Find the latest Deeper Cut every Wednesday in the Entertainment category at FanSided.