On Loving Canceled TV Shows

And wondering what could have been

It’s hard to communicate just how much my iPod shaped my coming of age.

Let’s set the scene: After the video iPod was released in 2005, I eagerly made the upgrade from my tiny black-and-blue Creative MuVo MP3 player. The MP3 player (and before that, my trusty CD player) had enabled me to pick my own soundtrack for any given moment. (Revolutionary for any moody millennial who wanted to gaze out the backseat car window in peace.) But the fifth-generation iPod offered a new level of autonomy. This screen — and by extension, the characters contained in that little window — felt like mine in a way that the living room TV did not.

Not long after, Apple began offering free downloads of select TV episodes through the iTunes Store. (This was in addition to another favorite free feature of mine, Single of the Week, which ran from 2004 to 2015 and introduced me to countless new songs and artists in that time.) Eager to expand my digital library, I downloaded with reckless abandon. As a result, I watched an unusual number of television pilots for a few years.

If you’re someone who wants to tell stories, one of my biggest recommendations is to learn everything you can about beginnings. Watch and read and listen to a lot of stuff; give it all your undivided attention. You’ll encounter things you like and things you don’t, and you’ll learn more about your tastes. Through it all, ask yourself: what compels you to follow a character to their story’s end?

In this iTunes era, there were plenty of shows I didn’t watch past the pilot. But there was something about The Black Donnellys that grabbed me. In fact, the concluding sequence of that first episode remains some of my favorite television of all time.

To say that I loved the Donnelly brothers is a vast understatement. Jimmy, Tommy, Kevin, and Sean are four brothers living in Hell’s Kitchen who maybe also dabble in a bit of crime here and there. (The show pulls its name from the legacy of the Ontario-based Irish Catholic Donnelly family.) Jonathan Tucker’s performance as Tommy — torn between his pursuit of becoming an artist and protecting his brothers from harm — is one that’s never left me.

Over thirteen episodes these characters wind their way in and out of dusty bars and city streets and godforsaken basements, all to explore one of my favorite premises: How far would you go to protect the ones you love?

Like so many crime dramas, The Black Donnellys charts the fallout from the drastic events of its pilot — a brutal first act that sets everything else in motion. This show is grimy and dark and its characters often do selfish and deeply human things. And yet I found that I loved those characters anyway — perhaps because they’re so deeply human.

One of my favorite aspects of the show is its narrator, the notoriously unreliable but always entertaining Joey Ice Cream. (Why the nickname? “’Cause under pressure, I’m like ice,” he claims, while a flashback shows a younger Joey pelting down the sidewalk, whining at the top of his lungs about a stolen carton of ice cream.) Inconsistencies riddle his story, told over the course of the season to various detectives, lawyers, and assorted guests visiting him in jail.

Sometimes you get the sense that Joey is rewriting the past as he retells it — because how would he have known that? Was he really in the room? Or is he finally achieving the insider status he yearned for by retroactively placing himself within the brothers’ inner circle — even if it means making things up?

“I always wanted brothers like that,” Joey confesses in the pilot, gazing longingly after the retreating Donnellys. And even though you know you can’t trust him, and you wish he would just tell you the truth — your heart goes out to him anyway.

Listen, I’m not going to lie to y’all; like many abruptly canceled shows, The Black Donnellys ends on a cliffhanger. And it’s absolutely brutal. There’s a lot I could say here about the specific confluence of factors that likely contributed to the show’s demise. Unsurprisingly, none of my suspicions have anything to do with the quality of the show itself.

For one thing, the premiere date was changed several times. Perhaps the biggest strike against it: an early episode was deemed “too violent” to air on network television, so you had to watch via NBC’s website instead. (Streaming had yet to become commonplace, so this was ironically a mark against it.) A handful of additional episodes premiered on the network, but NBC ultimately pulled the show from their lineup before it finished airing — the final episodes were relegated once more to their website. Ultimately I think the show likely would’ve thrived at HBO, but may have been just a bit too edgy for NBC.

In a retrospective panel hosted ten years after the show first aired, lead actor Jonathan Tucker expressed his disappointment with the network’s decision in a way that really resonated with me:

We have a pact with the audience, because you guys give your time to watch — just the way I do with shows that I care about. And what’s so frustrating is when we’ve entered into this promise together — which the network or the studio is a part of, as well — and then they don’t kind of finish those stories respectfully, that frustrates me. We have such a limited time on this earth and storytelling is kind of what sets us apart as a species, you know? We unite around stories.

I’ll always long for the parallel universe where The Black Donnellys got the ending it deserved, but I’m grateful that I still have that perfect beginning. There’s something about the pilot that continues to enrapture me, even though so many years have passed.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about potential. Which means I’ve also been thinking about the ways in which timing, economics, and politics can keep us from achieving what is possible. I have many complaints about making art under capitalism, but this is perhaps the one that most often breaks my heart: the idea that some stories will never be finished, or might never be told at all.

Art is fundamentally wound up in chance; there are so many variables outside of our control. You might have all the elements of a good story, and in the end it might turn out that your timing’s just wrong. But that doesn’t mean your story doesn’t matter. And it doesn’t mean you should stop telling stories, either.

Ten years after his show was canceled, Robert Moresco had this to say to a room full of fans:

The business that we’re in is very often taken over by variables that have nothing to do with good acting, writing, or directing… Don’t get caught up in the variables. Stay in the work.

Big news: one of my essays will be featured in a forthcoming anthology! And it’s also about unfinished stories — specifically, the Jane Eyre sequel Angela Carter never got to write. If I Can Be Honest is coming July 1 from Autofocus Books and it’s available for preorder now!

Relevant to today’s iPod nostalgia: I eulogized my beloved iPod in the essay I wrote about The Killers’ “Mr. Brightside” for last year’s March Danceness competition.

Funny little update to My Werner Herzog Year: I experienced another serendipitous Herzog tie-in this month, this time while I was reading Merlin Coverley’s The Art of Wandering: The Writer as Walker. Phenomenal book.

All right y’all, take care and I’ll see you again in April!