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The one time post-Super Bowl programming didn’t suck

The Super Bowl hits in about two hours, as I write this, and regardless of what happens in the game, here's a guarantee: whatever comes afterward will almost certainly suck. Networks have tried to launch new series, or rolled out trumped-up versions of existing favorites, but only once has this resulted in anything memorable -- way back in 1993, when NBC aired the first episode of Homicide: Life on the Street. This was The Wire before there was a Wire. Check this, from the very first episode, and tell me what you'd think if you saw this after a Super Bowl:

Me, I'd weep tears of joy -- well, probably tears of beer, given what time it'd be -- but still, this was some great television, and I can't believe it got a post-Super Bowl spot.

Brotherhood: A TV show you ought to dig up

Stop me if you've heard this one before: hourlong crime drama premieres on TV, attracts critical acclaim but no audience, vanishes into the ether.

Stop me if you've heard this one before: hourlong crime drama focuses on organized crime, giving a 21st-century spin on the classic Godfather riffs.

Brotherhood, a drama that lasted three seasons on Showtime, hit both of the marks above. Like The Wire, it was extraordinarily well-written and criminally (ha!) underappreciated. Like The Sopranos, it cut a cross-section across the lives of politicians and organized criminals in the bleary, gray northeast, in this case Providence, Rhode Island.

Here's the deal: the Caffee brothers, Tommy and Michael, have grown up to take very different paths. Tommy's a state representative in the Rhode Island House, while Michael is a criminal soldier-slash-boss. (I thought it was an absurdly convenient premise; turns out it's based on a true story. How 'bout that?) Through only 29 episodes -- but it seemed like many more -- we follow the Caffee brothers and their associated families, friends,  associates and enemies.

Despite what that image there would suggest, Brotherhood is a relentlessly downbeat series, but that's not a criticism. These people are bearing up under crushing weights of their own making, and it's painful to see them struggle against their own worse natures and, more often than not, slide back into the spiritual or emotional pits that they tried to claw out of. Tommy and Michael, in particular, must do battle with the angels and devils of their natures, if you'll pardon such a hack phrase, and both find that it's not so easy to draw lines when family's involved.

The show's done now, which is probably for the best; when you've got people on a downward trajectory, it only ends one of two ways -- they crater and die, or they recover and become far less interesting, from a dramatic perspective, than they were previously. (I don't have to live around these sick bastards, thankfully; I've got a few states between me and them.) The other option, of course, is that you just keep pumping blood into an artistic corpse, and what you end up with is just paint-by-numbers drama.

The moments of violence in this series are shocking; a Yankees fan meets a sudden, untimely end when he calls Ted Williams a "fag"; a would-be player who sought to do business with the Caffees learns to late that neither one of them are to be trusted. And the psychological violence is just as shattering; the boys' mother is as lethal with her words as her son Michael is with weaponry.

In true 2000s-era TV style, higher-profile shows are picking over the bones of Brotherhood for their cast members. Michael Caffee has shown up on Entourage (and as Draco Malfoy's dad in Harry Potter, though that was before this). Mob boss Freddy Cork has played against his character here by playing a dorky older brother on "Rescue Me" and a flunky on "Lost." Ma Caffee has also had a role on "Lost" as Faraday's mother; it's always jarring to see these well-known (to me, anyway) Brotherhood faces showing up in completely different locales.

So anyway, the show lives on in DVD form, and it's well worth checking out. Grab an entire season -- start at Season 1, obviously -- and see what you think. If nothing else, it'll tell you if you ever want to visit Rhode Island. Me, I'm not going without weaponry.

23 Shows You Should Be Watching: No. 18, Heroes

Synopsis: Everyday, normal folks all over the world are suddenly finding themselves imbued with amazing powers. It's nothing that us comic-book geeks haven't seen several hundred times, but for the rest of y'all, it's brand-spankin'-new.
Why You Should Watch: I'll spare you the whole treatise on how comic book fans have been on to something all along because humanity's truest, most resonant tales are those of people empowered to mythological proportions (Gilgamesh, Achilles, Superman, Anna Nicole's rack). Heroes works because there's not a single costume to be found anywhere, because the person, not the power, is at the heart of this series. Again, this kind of street-level characterization of godlike beings is the kind of thing that the X-Men was doing back in 1973, but hey--whatever works to get the rest of the world to dig on comic-style stuff.
Key Scene: Every revelation of powers has been a good one, particularly those that misdirect--we think Peter Petrelli can fly, but it turns out he's only leeching off the powers of his brother, who can. And the real-world use of superpowers is dead-on--who wouldn't use invisibility to swipe a purse or knock over a jackass or two? My personal favorite, though, involves Hiro the merry time-stopping Japanese guy. Trying to save his beloved from having her skull opened like a can-opener, he disappears from a diner, leaving his friend Ando sitting there alone. And then, Ando walks over to a wall of pictures and sees Hiro in one of them, in a picture taken six months before.
Key Quote: "Save the cheerleader, save the world." It's all there--apocalypse and goofiness, destiny and tongue-in-cheekiness.
Fun Fact: NBC is going all-out on promoting Heroes, from running free episodes to publishing a graphic novel to putting together a video game to...jeez, who knows. If you've got more time than I do, though, you could get seriously lost in the NBC Heroes mini-site.

23 Shows You Should Be Watching: No. 19, The Black Donnellys

Synopsis: Four Irish brothers find themselves awash in crime, drinking, brawling, gunplay, and broken hearts. It sounds like Stereotype Hell...but somehow it both embraces and transcends these well-traveled streets.
Why You Should Watch: Because it combines humor and violence, hope and hopelessness in a near-perfect balance that you don't often see on television. Most shows trying to balance on that line -- The Shield, say, or Rescue Me -- tilt too far in one direction or the other. The only reason The Black Donnellys is ranked this low is that we're only three episodes into the series -- there's plenty of time for it to move up the list.
Key Scene: At the end of the first episode, Tommy Donnelly realizes that the Italian mob is going to kill his brother Jimmy for kidnapping one of their bookies. So Tommy, until now a law-abiding guy, ices the head of the local Italian family -- and, for good measure, the head of the Irish family who was there to sell Jimmy out.
Key Quote: "He could have made it out, only he was never gonna let his brother get hurt again. And so Tommy became everything he never wanted. And whether he realized it or not, with Huey dead, Tommy'd just taken over the neighborhood." --Joey Ice Cream, friend of the brothers, recounting in an interrogation what Tommy did to the mobsters.
Key Quote 2: "Not those bodies." --One of the detectives, after Joey Ice Cream had told the hour-long story of Tommy's descent into the abyss. The episode began with the detective asking, "Where are the bodies?" and ended with the detective belting the camera -- Joey's POV -- with a telephone book.
Fun fact: The series was originally titled "The Truth According To Joey Ice Cream." Thankfully, that horrific title didn't survive to the second draft.
Fun fact 2: You can watch all the old episodes, plus an ultra-violent "web only" episode too rough for TV, by going to NBC's Black Donnellys site. Enjoy!