Speaker Murphy gets a cameo on Brotherhood

House Speaker William J. Murphy gets a cameo in the current (third) season of Showtime's Brotherhood. He calls it "a very small cameo appearance," and he would not disclose further details. However . . .

WARNING -- SPOILER ALERT.

If you are a fan of Brotherhood, and don't want to lose a certain element of surprise, stop reading this post NOW.

The current season of the locally set show has gotten some pretty positive press, including in the New York Times.

[I]t is worth speculating whether “Brotherhood,” which begins its third exceptional season on Sunday [October 31], would have found its way to Showtime at all if not for Dennis Lehane, whose novels have brought white New England ethnics into artistic vogue.

Mr. Lehane’s territory is the South End of Boston. “Brotherhood” is set 50 miles farther down I-95, in Providence, R.I., whose history of corruption the show’s creator, Blake Masters, uses as if it were an environmental toxin eroding away at everything. In a fictional neighborhood called the Hill, the Caffee brothers claim authority, Tommy (Jason Clarke) from a Democratic seat in the state legislature and Michael (Jason Isaacs), his nemesis, from a middle-management perch in the local mob.

The Hill is predominantly Irish, but everywhere you look, that hegemony is dissipating — Italians and Portuguese have long taken a piece of the action and the newly arrived Dominicans and Vietnamese are running drugs and undercutting profits from prostitution rings. When Tommy ran for re-election last season and realized Latinos weren’t supporting him, he finagled early closes for voting booths in Hispanic neighborhoods and got volunteers to call his constituents and claim his opponent held anti-immigration positions. In this world corruption is institutionalized, the bedrock of civic life. There are no alternatives: governors and mayors and state senators distinguish themselves from one another only by the degree of their fraudulence.

The current season revolves in part around Tommy’s wish to get out of the legislature and off the Hill, a desire that drives him to even more baroque duplicity. He is changing course not as a result of a bruised soul but because he realizes that all of his unsavory behavior still won’t guarantee the ascension he has envisioned for himself. Comparisons to “The Sopranos” have been made since “Brotherhood” first appeared. But Tony Soprano had money and power — his series was the product of a boom economy. Tommy is essentially forced to choose between the two.

SPOILER ALERT.

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

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Murphy plays a judge who swears in Tommy Cafee as the speaker of the RI House.