Post Description

The series follows four young Roman Catholic Irish-American brothers in Hell"s Kitchen and their involvement with organized crime.  Although the show is set in the present day, it draws heavily upon Irish-American history and iconic themes. The pilot episode illustrates a clear tension and rivalry between the Irish and the Italians. The episodes are narrated by a childhood friend, Joey "Ice Cream", whom the show depicts as an unreliable narrator. In creating the show, Haggis, a native of London, Ontario, strongly referenced his hometown"s local history about the real-life Black Donnellys and the massacre associated with their name. In the pilot episode, Joey says that the neighborhood is populated primarily by "Black Irish", whom he calls "a race of dark-haired people" that the Celts had failed to wipe out in Ireland. Hell"s Kitchen in the series is also a fairly faithful depiction - a traditionally working class neighborhood with a deeply entrenched ethnic Irish population and an Irish Mob with control over gambling, loansharking, and heavy involvement in the unions. Although the Black Donnellys is set in 2005, Hell"s Kitchen is shown to be slowly overtaken by gentrification and development that threatens to displace the Irish population, a fate that Hell"s Kitchen actually succumbed to in the early 1990s.