Sean Donnelly

The Black Donnellys is an American television drama that debuted on NBC on February 26, 2007 and last aired on April 2, 2007. Thereafter, NBC began releasing new episodes weekly on NBC.com until the series was cancelled. The Black Donnellys was created by Paul Haggis and Robert Moresco featured in the cast Jonathan Tucker, Olivia Wilde, Billy Lush, Tom Guiry, Kirk Acevedo, and relative newcomers Michael Stahl-David and Keith Nobbs.The series follows four young Roman Catholic Irish-American brothers in New York Citys Hells Kitchen neighborhood, and their involvement with petty and organized crime. Set in the present day, the show draws heavily upon Irish-American history and iconic themes. The pilot episode illustrates a clear tension and rivalry between Irish and Italians. The episodes are narrated by a childhood friend, Joey Ice Cream, whom the show depicts as an unreliable narrator.In creating the show, Haggis, a native of London, Ontario, strongly referenced his hometowns local history about the real-life Black Donnellys and the massacre associated with their name. In the pilot episode, Joey says the neighborhood is populated primarily by Black Irish, whom he calls a race of dark-haired people the Celts had failed to wipe out in Ireland. Hells Kitchen in the series is also a fairly faithful depiction – a traditionally working-class neighborhood with a deeply entrenched ethnic Irish population and an Irish Mob with control over illegal gambling and loansharking, and heavy involvement in the unions.On April 2, 2007, NBC announced that the series would be pulled after the April 16 episode, presumably because of insufficient viewership, and that unaired episodes would be streamed online on NBC.com as well as downloadable from iTunes. The shows NBC TV time slot was filled by the second and third episodes of the US version of Thank God Youre Here on April 9 and 16, after which the time slot was filled by the series The Real Wedding Crashers.On May 14, 2007, the series was cancelled by NBC. On June 5, 2007, it was announced that HDNet had acquired the rights from NBC Universal to broadcast all 13 episodes of the series, beginning June 13, 2007. A DVD entitled The Black Donnellys: The Complete Series was released on September 4, 2007.

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