Copper deserves a little patience. The series begins in a rather muddled way, oscillating between its registers, the historical fiction, a police investigation occupying almost every episode, and the psychological drama. You have to take the trouble to see the whole unfold during the first season. The second was released on DVD in October. Unknown here, the series was stopped in 2013. Copper enjoys prestigious patronage, Tom Fontana, who made Oz and who piloted Borgia. In this case, he wrote little, but he co-created the soap opera with Will Rokos. Filmmaker Barry Levinson heads the production.
New York in 1864, a year before the end of the Civil War. Coming from Ireland, Kevin Corcoran (played by Tom Weston-Jones) is a cop in the middle of this city of which it is said that certain districts are “the places on Earth closest to hell”. A protagonist says so about Five Points, a neighborhood where Kevin often has to crack down. Returning from the front, he lost his daughter, and his wife disappeared. The research, both of his wife and of the causes of the death of his daughter, haunts him, in his entertaining evenings at the brothel. He becomes attached to a young girl whose life, too, is very close to hell.
Life, at that time: even among the cops, when they track down bank robbers, the notion of “police brutality” designates the simplest reality of the procedures. In the beautiful neighborhoods, which Kevin can sometimes frequent, violence rages in the form of brutal power games, blackmail and political shenanigans.
It is on these historical and local aspects that Copper acquires its depth. In the gesture and the aesthetic, one can think of a Peaky Blinders in the New World, or a series which would pose some beginnings of the epics of Martin Scorcese. Having captured the brutality of the context, Copper tackles this war that tore the country apart, far beyond the battlefields. Kevin’s shattered memories tell of this trauma, as well as his quest and what happened to it.
And the conflict comes to town. The writers postulate that New York also has its southern partisans, acquired with the cause of the Confederates, hidden. This gives sometimes lively dialogues: “Slavery is one of the greatest blessings that God has granted to the black man”, launches a notable. Facing him, a wealthy widow replied: “You know, I find it remarkable that the South goes to war, in search of its own independence, while an entire race is denied its own.”
Suddenly evoked, the Confederate grudge, when the southerners begin to lose ground, bursts into the city decor. It motivates the maneuvers of the underground partisans, until the preparation of attacks, whose violence and scale should be increasing according to the plans of the plotters. From then on, the American rifts, from the New York stage, turn to internal terrorism.
Despite his clumsiness, Copper becomes much more interesting, describing unpretentiously, through series of scenes of action and suspense, which has so ravaged the country. The echoes of the shallows, the atmospheres of filthy hovels, the challenges of the cobblestones mingle with great history, the formation of the nation in clashes and bloodshed. The war invites itself in the alleys and in the squares, it poisons Kevin until a final of the first season which initiates a new concern for the character. Dark Echoes of 1864, in New York.
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