At one point in the pilot, ubiquitous narrator Joey Ice Cream (of course everyone has a colorful nickname) notes that all the prejudice about the Irish being violent drunks sometimes makes them want to drink a lot and beat people up. It's meant to be a cute turn of phrase, but it reveals how Haggis seems to think acknowledging the clichés will somehow forgive him for using them. Even beyond their generic Irish-thug background, each of the four Donnelly brothers gets only one defining trait: there's the Responsible One, the Screw-Up, the Ladies' Man and the Dangerous One. By the end of the first episode, Tommy (Jonathan Tucker), the Responsible One, has pulled a Michael Corleone and ended up in charge of organized crime in the brothers' neighborhood. His ascension is played as a big moment and comes off well, but there's still no avoiding how ripped-off it feels, from The Godfather as well as plenty of other crime stories.
And that's the thing about Donnellys that's the most irritating: Not that it rips off elements of other crime stories, because most crime stories end up remarkably similar, but that it's so damn self-important about such a well-worn genre story. Every conversation the brothers have is fraught with portent; nothing they say is less than an expression of all the pent-up feelings they've dealt with their entire lives. One of the great pleasures of crime stories in film and TV is the unabashed action scene, the shoot-'em-up, but Donnellys is so somber that even the fistfights are melancholy.
One thing that Haggis isn't doing here, though, is lecturing, so in that sense Donnellys is an improvement on both Crash and Studio 60. If it could lose the pretensions and embrace its simple, pulpy roots as a crime drama, and not a sweeping statement on class, family and immigration, it might even be a worthy companion to its lead-in and the season's most successful new show, the straightforward and satisfying Heroes.