Copper

Our Review

BBC America took the one thing prestige TV had never really done and went straight at it: a drama about the Great Famine Irish immigrants who built America’s police forces. Copper ran 2012 and 2013, two seasons, set in the Five Points of 1860s New York, and starred Tom Weston-Jones as Cork-born Patrick “Copper” Corcoran, a man who put on the uniform of the class that despises him to keep his family alive.

The first season hits hard: the draft riots haven’t come yet, but you can hear them coming in every scene. Ron Moore and the Irish-British writing team (the series grew out of the Irish crime drama Prime Suspect, and you can tell) treat poverty with more precision than most period TV manages. The 63% Rotten Tomatoes number for season one undersells it; the 80% average across the run tells closer to the truth.

Then production chaos: the show was shot in Toronto on a collapsing budget, the writers’ room emptied between seasons, and season two visibly limps. Cancelled in 2013 with a cliffhanger left bleeding. Rumors of a wrap-up film surfaced and died.

Watch it as one long, rough, brilliant novel with a missing final chapter. The opening season alone is a better hour of television than most shows manage in a year. Our score: 7/10.