KEY POINTS:
You can see why calling Underbelly the Australian Sopranos was going to prove irresistible to headline writers and those flogging the series.
Set during Melbourne's gang wars a decade ago, there is going to be lots of whacking and sunglasses and blonde bints.
By the time the gang wars were brought under control, more than 30 people were dead. One woman, wife to one of the nasties, lost her husband and two sons. This is real-life stuff, and the characters bear the names of the real players in a bloody game. Underbelly (TV3, Sunday, 9.30pm) can't yet be shown in Victoria. The Supreme Court ruled showing it could prejudice a murder trial.
Nobody goes to see a shrink in Underbelly. And, so far, there is no ambiguity about these characters: they might love their wives and kids but we are not, on the evidence of last night's episode, going to end up in a love/hate relationship with them the way we did with the Soprano family.
But you have to stick with it. There are difficulties with narrative drive, you get that with true stories. So last night we were just getting to know the psychotic Alphonse, who has charisma and madness enough to carry a series, when he gets whacked. And they do whack hard on this show. Before Alphonse gets his, he got a sort of mate who owed him money. Alphonse emptied his gun. "Why'd you shoot him so many times?" asked Jase, who is a real tough guy himself. "You see the size of the fat f***?" said Alphonse. Right, that makes sense then: it takes a lot of bullets to finish off a fat guy.
Alphonse was a nutter who took pills and called himself The Black Prince of Lygon Street. He got away with that murder. "You're coated in Teflon," said his mate. "What the f***'s Teflon?" said Alphonse who, on reflection, was possibly too thick to live.
So, that's one major player down; many more to go. And so far, it looks good: dark, jittery, edgy. Just don't expect it to look like the Sopranos. What it does share with that fictional bad lot is the focus on the domestic. Even really bad guys have to go home to their families, even if they've just been out shooting other bad guys and shagging some sheila who goes to work in her knickers.
Alphonse got home after killing the fat guy to his wife telling him the dishwasher was on the blink again and had he seen the reminder about the kids' school fees? And what was he doing in the laundry in the early hours of the morning? Fat guys have a lot of blood, and it gets everywhere, he might have said, but didn't.
I watched the second episode to make sure I'd want to get involved with such a bad bunch.
Despite the lurching narrative of the first episode, an uneven script and an irritating and unnecessary voice-over from a cop, Underbelly looks promisingly like a very good crime series. And it does have an undeniable edge: It really happened, just over the Ditch.
