Darren returns to Dublin from Spain where he has been hiding from the police. He arrives to greet his brother who has finally been released from prison. Before he can get to Robbie, Robbie is gunned down in cold blood outside a newsagent. Arrested by the police, Darren is aided by gangland boss, John Boy Power, who gets his charge thrown out of court on a technicality...

Love/Hate (2011 – 2016) is a gritty crime drama show from RTE; the show was created by Stuart Carolan and starred actors little known outside of Ireland, with the exception of Aidan Gillen, who also appears as Little Finger in Game of Thrones.

In many ways it’s an unusual show. Given the premise, you would think that all the focus would be on Darren’s pursuit of Robbie’s killer and while that does run as a thread through the whole of the first season, the show is opened up into a more ensemble work. Even as he is burying his brother, Darren (Robert Sheehan) must face up to other past choices, including Rosie (Ruth Negga), the woman he left behind. While, it is obvious that the two still have feelings for each other, Rosie is now with child and it’s not by Darren.

It does not take Darren long to fall back into his criminal ways, aided by local gang lord John Boy (Aidan Gillen) whose gang includes his half-brother Hughie (Brian Gleeson), Nidge (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor) who spends his time working out how to look after his gun from You Tube videos, Tommy (Killian Scott) who should have met Robbie, but was late as he is in a relationship with Darren’s sister.

The show does a fine job of making, what are essentially amoral characters meaningful and interesting and apart for Hughie, who even from the first instance strikes you as bat shit crazy, the characters oscillate between the dark and the light. Much of the story unfolds against the background of Nidge’s impending wedding as the tensions and mistrust within the criminal gangs threaten to tear them apart as small slights turn into a reason to kill.

The show is not unlike The Godfather, with the criminal life being a constant background to their attempts to look like they are living normal lives, with girlfriends and wives, who are themselves, complicit by their acceptance of the money and their silence. The writers weave an intricate and engrossing tale which made me happily binge watch the two seasons.

Not to be unkind, but Ireland is not particularly renowned for its international drama output, but this show changed all of that. Not that the show is devoid of a few niggling problems. The acting is not one of these and the cast are universally good in their roles, just don’t go looking for the good guy, there isn’t one. The show was quite cheap to make so there is a lot of location filming, I suspect that there is no built sets.

Both season one and two were included for review and although it did settle down, at the beginning of season one there were a couple of amateurish shots, probably not helped by the fact it looks like a lot of the show uses video tape, which on the one hand does help towards the gritty look of the show, but can make a bad shot even worse than it needed to be. That said, by the middle of season one most of these problems seemed to have been resolved.

The show had quite short seasons, so it’s possible to binge watch a season over a couple of nights. Season one contained four episodes, each a little under an hour’s length. Season two expanded this to six episodes. The DVD set contains no extra unless these were on the third disc, which was not supplied.

It’s a good show and one that is well worth catching up with.

8

Charles Packer