Showtime’s City on a Hill Checks All the Boxes in the Boston Crime Cliché Playbook
We. Get. It. You take place in Bahstan. Pipe down.
Photo Courtesy of Showtime
Ben Affleck and Matt Damon need to get over their Boston obsession.
I say this as someone who loved The Town, Gone Baby Gone and The Departed—all movies that explored the Boston crime underworld, the crooked police force that aided and abetted, and the long-standing ramifications of their corrupt interactions.
Showtime’s City on a Hill, which boasts both Affleck and Damon as executive producers, is so derivative of those three projects (you even can play six degrees of Kevin Bacon while you watch) that it’s laughable. I get why Affleck and Damon are so enamored with this particular slice of Boston history and lore; it’s fertile ground for a story. But you’ve had your fun and now it has to stop.
While watching these first episodes, I could almost hear a Saturday Night Live parody of series: “In a city that’s on a hill, one man fights for justice against a shady cop and a dishonest system, this fall on a very special episode of Law & Order: Boston.”
Just as I was conjuring up this fake ad, Kevin Bacon’s character actually says to another character as a vague threat: “give your mother my best.” All I could think about was that Mark Wahlberg skit “say hello to your mother for me.” And then just in case I didn’t get what was happening, a character listens to “Good Vibrations,” the Marky Mark classic. We. Get. It. City on a Hill. We. Get. It. You take place in Bahstan. Pipe down.
The series checks all the boxes in the Boston crime cliché playbook: the accents (Just stop trying. Please, I beg of you); the name dropping (Legal Seafoods, Doug Flutie and the defunct Lechmere all get shout-outs); the stereotypical take on Catholicism; the gratuitous female nudity and rampant coke snorting—all are well-trodden tropes. At least the pilot was filmed in Boston, which gives the series an air of authenticity; nothing bugs me more than shows allegedly taking place in Boston but then there are palm trees everywhere.
The story begins in the wake of the Charles Stuart scandal. In 1989 Charles Stuart’s pregnant wife, Carol, was attacked and murdered in an apparent car-jacking when Charles and Carol were on their way home from a childbirth class. Charles said a black man attacked them, and an innocent man named Willie Bennett was arrested. Charles’ brother later confessed that Charles himself had committed the crime, and Charles Stuart committed suicide.
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