Originally going by a different name, Kin came about as co-creator Ciaran Donnelly felt that inner-city Dublin life was being under-explored onscreen.
JOE recently interviewed co-creator of Kin, Ciaran Donnelly, where he spoke about the chances of a third season of his hit Irish crime drama and about his in the works Cú Chulainn movie.
Acclaimed for his directing work on high-profile TV shows like Altered Carbon, The Tudors, Vikings and The Wheel of Time as well, we also asked Donnelly during the conversation about how he transitioned from directing to co-creating Kin with Peter McKenna.
In response, he said that he had always written on and off and that as he was having meetings with production companies or studios in the US or production companies in the UK regarding potential directing gigs, he began pitching his own ideas.
Donnelly said:
“So, I basically started the process of what became Kin back in 2010, even before 2010. I wrote an outline for a story, three seasons worth of story, for a show which was called Townsend and based around Townsend Street.”
“It was all based around the Concerned Parents Against Drugs movement which happened in Ireland, in Dublin, particularly in the 80s and 90s – where communities banded together to drive drug dealers out.
“So, I invented this family of characters and I took that out to the UK and to Los Angeles and I pitched it. I partnered with a company in London called Headline and it was initially developed there.
“I wrote the script and the series bible and then basically we got finance. The UK company brought in finance from a Canadian company called Bron Studios which was financing pretty well-known movies at the time.
“So, we hired a room of other writers including Peter and we set about developing out the episodes for a first and second season. Then there was a process to the development and Kin is what emerged from that.”
Despite the name change, Donnelly states that “the bones” of Townsend remain in Kin.
“I mean the characters’ names are even the same basically, I mean the bones of it all are in Kin even into the second season,” he told JOE.
“But there’s no doubt that Peter’s influence over it was really key and pivotal to the show going forward. He did fantastic work.
“What he did was he homogenised the idea of the family and the idea of Kin, Kinsella and all that kind of stuff and it’s been really successful… It turned out really really well in the end.”
Though work on what became Kin started around 2010, Donnelly has long been interested in gritty, Dublin-set stories – even going back to his early shorts made in the ’90s: Dirty Old Town and Pinned.
Explaining why he is drawn to such tales, he said: “In the mid-90s, there was a lot going on in Dublin. It was sort of pre or the lead-up to the time of The General and that kind of Irish, and Dublin particularly, crime scene was really I suppose present in coverage in terms of print media and stuff like that.
“I still have a file, a big sort of box of articles I collected over the years in that time and I was really trying to fashion that into either a film or series.”
On Dirty Old Town and Pinned, he says: “[They were] very much set in inner-city Dublin and there weren’t really people exploring that sort of area – that world or those lives and I was just very interested in it.
“I suppose there’s an analogy to be drawn towards what [Martin] Scorsese had done with his gangster films with Goodfellas and things like that.
“I was like what’s the Irish version of that? What’s the Dublin version of that at the time? It was nothing like Goodfellas obviously but yeah, I really like that earthiness.
“I still do love the character of the inner city and the stories that emerge from it.”
