Showrunners Chris Brancato and Michael Panes are no strangers to crafting criminal dramas, with credits including Narcos, Hotel Cocaine, and Godfather of Harlem. Their latest show, The Westies, is set in 1980s Hell’s Kitchen, New York, and follows the Irish-American gang known as The Westies. The first two episodes premiered on July 12th, with a new episode debuting on Sundays.

J.K. Simmons, known for his roles as J. Jonah Jameson in Spider-Man and Omni-Man in Invincible, portrays Eamon Sweeney, the boss of The Westies, inspired by real-life gangsters.

“JJJ is pretty much all bark, as you said, and he barks very loudly and quickly,” Simmons compares his Spider-Man character to his The Westies character. “I think one of the things, and this was just on the page to me, in the way that Michael and Chris wrote it, there’s a quiet menace there, and you see the same thing often with a lot of characters in the show, really.”

As Sweeney, he has to deal with other criminal organizations and the younger members.

“You see it with Hamish Allan-Headley as John Gotti,” Simmons added. “You see it with Titus, you see it with Jimmy. I mean, a lot of the time, the younger ones might tend to be a little more there, might be a little more bravado and in your face, but the older guys who have survived for this long, I think that quiet menace is very organic to who these guys are.”

The showrunners wanted more freedom in the story, and so they decided not to make this a biopic or docudrama.

“We’re not doing a biopic or a docudrama, so we’re not using the names of Jimmy Coonin or Mickey Featherstone or Mickey Spillane,” Panes said. “You know, what we’re doing is creating a fictionalized show inspired by a multitude of characters from that era, so to distill the essence of it, because we want audiences to stay with these characters over multiple seasons and grow with them and three-dimensionalize them and make them kind of people you want to invite in.”

About The Westies

Synopsis: The Westies is a gritty and kinetic crime drama centering on New York City’s infamously violent Irish gang of the same name. The series is set in the early 1980s when the construction of the Jacob Javits Convention Center on the Westies’ home turf in Hell’s Kitchen promises a financial windfall. Despite being outnumbered fifty-to-one by the Five Families of the Italian Mafia, the Westies’ legendary brutality and cunning have given them the leverage necessary to share the spoils through a fragile détente. But internal conflict between the brash younger generation and the old-school leadership threatens to set a match to this powder keg, which will sweep the Westies into the FBI’s ever-deepening investigation into the Italian mafia.

The series stars J.K. Simmons, Titus Welliver, Tom Brittney, Stanley Morgan, Sarah Bolger, Jessica Frances Dukes, Hamish Allan-Headley, Vincent Walsh, Allen Leech, and Hillary McCormack. Additional cast includes Aidan Wojtak-Hissong, Jeremy Walmsley, and Rohan Mead.

The series is written by Chris Brancato and Michael Panes.

It’s directed by Alan Taylor (101, 102), Chris Grismer (103, 104), John Fawcett (105, 106), and Adam Kane (107, 108).

Executive prodicers are Chris Brancato, Michael Panes, Raymond Quinlan, Alan Taylor, Frank Siracusa, and John Weber.