Two lead actors from the Liverpool crime drama This City Is Ours have rejected claims that the series presents the city in a negative light and glamourises a life of crime. They described the programme as fundamentally a story about relationships and family that could unfold in any major city, while it follows the fortunes of a fictional crime family. The show has been commissioned for a further series. The performers said they were not glamourising anything and were being honest about the harm such a life causes, noting that circumstances worsen for every character. One spoke of pressure to represent the city authentically and of care taken not to lean on stereotypes, and both cast the overall reaction as positive.
I am convinced those defences land where they should. A narrative that refuses to spare its own figures from consequences is not a recruitment poster. It is a reckoning. When every arc bends toward loss rather than triumph, the moral weather of the piece becomes unmistakable to me. I do not hear an invitation to envy so much as a demand to recognise cost—the fraying of bonds, the hollowing of futures, the price extracted from people who matter to one another.
What moves me most is the insistence that this could be any big city. That claim is not a dodge in my reading. It is an assertion of universality. Families fracture under pressure in more places than one. Ambition curdles into harm without needing a single postcode to explain it. To treat the setting as the entire message is, in my view, to mistake geography for destiny. I would rather a drama risk local texture than sand every edge smooth until nothing difficult remains.
If authenticity carries pressure—and of course it does—then meeting that pressure with deliberate care is the responsible path. The alternative is timid art that never sets foot in complicated places for fear of an unflattering photograph. I reject that trade-off. Better an honest portrait that some find uncomfortable than a flattering silence that teaches nothing about how love and loyalty buckle.
Consider what happens when we demand that every narrative tied to a particular place must first serve as civic advertising. The result is not dignity. It is paralysis. Storytellers would be forced to choose between honesty and loyalty, and honesty would lose. I cannot endorse a standard that treats creative work as unpaid boosterism. (And yes, I know that sounds severe—but the stakes for free storytelling really are that high for me.)
The public appetite for crime stories does not, on my terms, prove glamourisation. People can watch because they are drawn to stakes, to secrecy, to the question of what survives when the ground gives way. Curiosity about darkness is not the same as appetite for it. If life grows steadily worse for the figures followed, the emotional contract looks to me like caution, not celebration.
I value the decision to keep relationships above the machinery of crime as the stated centre. That hierarchy tells me where attention is meant to sit. Schemes may supply plot, yet the engine, as framed, is kinship under strain. When the personal remains primary, the work earns the right, in my judgment, to be weighed as drama first and as civic messaging second.
Suppose we accepted the opposite premise—that any depiction of wrongdoing set in a real place inevitably brands that place forever. We would then be left with a culture that can only tell safe stories about nowhere in particular. That seems to me a poorer world. Conditional on wanting art that feels lived-in, we must tolerate the risk that some observers will misread intention as endorsement. I accept that risk rather than the chill of permanent caution.
Pride in a finished work that its makers describe as well received does not strike me as arrogance. It strikes me as the natural stance of people who believe they treated their subject with seriousness. I share that stance on the evidence of their own framing. An attempt to look hard at damage without blinking is the opposite of glamour as I define it.
In the end I side with the view that family, not fantasy, is the true subject. Cities are large enough to contain difficult stories without being reduced to them. If we lose the nerve to tell those stories, we lose more than entertainment; we lose a way of knowing ourselves. I would rather keep the nerve.
