Kingpin: The horror is in the house?

NBC CEO Bob Wright, We're Coming After You, Bitch!


The networks said they wanted a Traffic meets Sopranos. The writer-producer wanted to remake Macbeth by way of The Godfather. What we got was Dynasty (Spelling is a co-producer!) meets Tarantino, a violent and sex-dredged proto-soap about the rise of doe-eyed Miguel Cadena (Yancey Arias), an American-educated Mexican family "advisor" to his uncle Kingpin, his gringo wife Marlene (a haggard Sherilyn Fenn) and his older murderous brother Chato (Bobby Cannavale). Unfortunately, the mini-series had the misfortune of debuting in the run-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom, where the concept of a crime drama that smeared the borders between good and evil might have been a bit dissonant with the patriotic "black v. white" (not literally) war drumming at the time.

Two stories set in America run in parallel to the Mexican story and suggest that they would collide in the finale,had this sseries not been axed by the network jackanapes after six episodes. The first subplot, follows the disgrace and redemption of a Chicano DEA agent (the proverbial "white hat") who after her fall in El Paso (connected with hijinks by the Cadenas), she is transferred to Houston where, unlikely as it might seem, she stumbles once upon a Cadena family connection (although she never finds this out). The second story - I wouldn't call it a subplot, is also set in Houston and provides the comic relief. Brian Benben, who I thought was great in Dream On (HBO), plays a gambling plastic surgeon who has fallen in with the Cadenas and now has storage locker full of their cocaine he needs to get rid of to please the local enforcer and pay for a messy divorce. In the first few episodes, he meets and becomes friends with the much younger Shay Roundtree, a breakout as a baby-faced assassin who first gains notice in a stunning hit scene where his skateboard plays a key role. Roundtree's and Benben's unlikely father-son (dealer-enforcer) relationship, set in place by episode six, was perhaps the most original aspect of the entire series.

Episodes 1-2 deal with Miguel's takeover of the family and we're introduced to his lovely family that will no doubt continue to cause him problems. Episodes 4-6 show him struggling to maintain his power as he fights the Tijuana cartel, deals with a local Chief of Police, a Mexican senator and his friendly local CIA agent. Throughout it all, we see, a la Michael Corleone, his reluctant descent into evil. Like Tony Soprano, though, his biggest problems come from his own family. By the last episode, his brother has become unhinged after being raped in jail and is bent on revenge even it means bringing down the family and his wife is dealing with a secret cocaine habit for which he is terrified that he will lose the last person he can trust. In response, his young son is showing signs of stress and worry as the he starts to pierce the secrets and lies around his sheltered existence.

Kingpin does fall back on TV cliches at times and suffers what has, thanks to the Sopranos, become a shopworn theme. The over-the-top villains that accent each episode are fun to watch don't always lend to believability. Given the fact that the series star is essentially a bad guy (and we find out how bad in episode five when he puts an innocent prostitute to death), I suppose you need these wacko villains to draw a distinction from his measured evil via their unbridled evil. The whole family vs. Family is, as I contend, really owned by Sopranos already and, at least within the first six episodes, the scenes with the son and the wife's personal crisis tended to drag things down. Maybe in a few years, we'll be ready for a similarly themed story but not until David Chase shoots his proverbial wad. I surmise that they were trying to set up a finale where the son would be truly threatened (some of the dream sequences suggest this outright) but at least in eps. 1-6 the boy's problems seem trivial compared with, say, going to war with the Mexican government or Chato's prison rape.

The real main theme, at least for this first batch of episodes (there were twelve planned total eps) I think is Miguel's corruption a la Michael of the Godfather. He's no innocent in this, either, the series points out, and had plenty of opportunities, one would conclude, to disassociate himself from the family but his greed and ambition win over and he knows it. It's pointed out that he holds dual citizen ship in the US, his wife is a lawyer and he's Stanford educated. The crucial scene, I think, occurs in the episode 5 where in Miguel must decide the fate of an innocent prostitute who has accidentally killed a crony. At first he wavers but his brother convinces him that she could be an inconvenient witness and bring the family down. This brings him to a flashback where he is handed a gun as a young man but can't do the deed himself and instead hands it to his brother. Is his path selected not just because of his own ambition but to prove himself to his ruthless family as well? Will he someday have to be the one that pulls the trigger on his brother, who is later accused of threatening La Corporacion - he spares him in the end of episode six but for how long? Like the murder of Banquo, the murder of this innocent, though, will be the one that haunts him. Alas, we'll never know, though, unless NBC makes a movie like they did with The Last Don. You can see these crucial scenes at Yancey Arias's website here.

David Mills, a local guy, created this work. Mills, you might remember, was the Washington Times journalist who interviewed Professor Griff of Public Enemy in the '80s and led to Griff's banishment from the group because of anti-Semitic remarks. Mills has written and produced NYPD Blue, Homicide, the afore-mentioned The Wire (he's apparently pals with Baltimore's David Simon) and was exec. producer of HBO's overlooked ghetto soap opera, The Corner. Like Shay Roundtree and Michael Cannavale, I expect to see lots more from this guy - hey, how about a mini-series on DC's own: Rayful Edmonds?

Some interesting guest-starring shots from the likes of Danny Trejo ("From Dusk to Dawn"), as a sadistic but stupid family rival in ep. 2 and also Darius McCrary ("Vampires: Los Muertos") as a hiphop rap producer-criminal (eps. 2-6) lighten things up. There's too little of Ana Mercedes as Tio Consuela (ep2-3), the family witch -- who I'm guessing would have been outed by series end as The Big Bad -- but then we'll never know (unless David Mills wants to write something in our comments section???).

Unlike Firefly, alas, there's no wrap-up movie or anything in the works. NBC showed this and then buried it. The DVD, which can be rented via Netflix, includes uncensored scenes that probably didn't make it to TV (I dunno, not having seen it when it came out) and interviews with Mills and the major actors.

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