Creator draws on past for 'Black Donnellys'

The four brothers protect one another against all odds.
By TERRY MORROW
KNOXVILLE NEWS-SENTINEL
NBC is serving up its own version of "The Sopranos" -- except nobody's rich, nobody's fat and nobody's Italian.
Well, "The Black Donnellys" (debuting 10 p.m. Monday) does have a "mob" element to it, and it's all about family.
The working-class Irish-American Donnelly brothers of New York City are caught up in organized crime. They don't give the orders. They carry them out.
They steal. They fight. They walk the fine line between being caught and being trapped -- by both sides of the law.
The close-knit brothers will do anything to protect each other against all odds.
Oldest brother Jimmy (Thomas Guiry) walks with a limp because of a hit-and-run accident when he was a child. Reckless and volatile, Jimmy gets into hot water with the law -- and has held a grudge ever since an Italian mobster beat his father to death.
Second son Tommy (Jonathan Tucker) has had his brushes with the law but is now on the straight-and-narrow. He is torn between his ambition of being an artist and being dragged down the dark crime path.
Third-born Kevin (Billy Lush) is ready to leap into danger without a second thought. An inveterate gambler, the quiet and loyal Kevin bets on everything and always loses, but somehow remains convinced that he was born lucky.
Youngest brother Sean (Michael Stahl-David) is the charmer of the family, with a tendency to steal his brothers' girlfriends.
Behind the show
"The Black Donnellys" has a strong lineage. Academy Award winners Paul Haggis and Bobby Moresco ("Crash") are the creators. The show is loosely based on Moresco's life.
"I grew up in a place most people called 'Hell's Kitchen.' We called it 'the neighborhood,' 51st Street and 10th Avenue, midtown Manhattan, '60s and '70s," Moresco says.
"There was an Irish mob there that a lot of the world knows as 'The Westies.' ... What we did is we took those experiences growing up, and Paul and I fashioned a world from those ideas and from those incidents and from a lot of the people that I knew growing up, but none of this is absolutely biographical. None of it.
"But as a jumping-off point, Paul and I created a world that we think is exciting."