Passions: Why Irish crime drama Kin is my latest box set binge

Clare Dunne, Charlie Cox, Ciarán Hinds and Aidan Gillen in Kin. Picture: BBC/Headline Pictures

For all those who love optimistic, joyful and sparkly shows like Strictly, there are some of us who prefer their TV entertainment to be as pitch black as a pint of Guinness.

Enter Irish crime drama Kin, which has popped up recently on the BBC and is available on iPlayer.

It opens with the build-up to a shooting and then cuts to a celebration to mark the release of Michael Kinsella (Charlie Cox) after a lengthy term in prison, for an as yet undisclosed crime. Doe-eyed and humble, he pointedly steers well clear of any of the booze and drugs being consumed by the rest of the clan.

He has two brothers, scenery-chewing Emmet J Scanlan as hot-headed Jimmy and The Wire veteran Aidan Gillen as Frank, who runs the family business – which is distributing class A drugs to the estates of Dublin.

There’s also Frank’s even more hot-headed son Eric (Sam Keeley), known to all as Viking, his hard as nails aunt Birdy (Maria Doyle Kennedy) and Clare Dunne as Lady Macbethish Amanda, who is Jimmy’s wife and runs the money-laundering car dealership. Michael also has an estranged daughter Anna (Hannah Areoye) and there are various associates including family heavy Dotser (Neil Fleming), and dealers Kem (Ryan Lincoln) and Fudge (Thommas Kane Byrne).

Have you got all that? It took us at least two episodes to work out who was who to whom. But stick with it, or use this as a handy aide memoire.

They are a friendly bunch, with Jimmy showing his eldest son Jamie (Cian Fitzsimmons) the finer points of debt collection by ironing the face of a drug addict. Thankfully, though, most of the violence is off-screen but there is plenty of menace as the accidental death of a family member regarded as a civilian pitches the Kinsellas against a bigger crime gang led by Eamon Cunningham (Ciarán Hinds).

With tit for tat shootings and a police investigation into the family’s activities, the pressure builds on the Kinsellas, who are holed up in their modernist luxury home, where tensions, rivalries and old scores lurk beneath the surface.

Can they survive against the better resourced Cunningham family? A second season suggests they might, but you’ll have to watch to see how.

Will Slater is a sub editor at The Scotsman