The fantastic performances don’t do enough to lift this scouse Sopranos. There’s an essential emptiness at the core of this generic show

“I sort of hope they all die,” is never the reaction a television drama wishes to evoke. But in relation to the drug-running family the Phelans and their colleagues and connections that make up This City Is Ours, that just might be your response.

Sean Bean plays cocaine-smuggling patriarch Ronnie Phelan, who has enjoyed a long career dominating Liverpool’s drug trade. He is now considering retirement and, it seems, is planning to hand over the reins to his right-hand man of 20 years, Michael (James Nelson-Joyce, recently brilliant as Treacle Goodson in A Thousand Blows). Michael is pretty pleased. It almost makes up for his discovery that he has a low sperm count and that he and Diana (Hannah Onslow), the love of his life, will need to use IVF to start a family. If that all seems a jarring juxtaposition, it is. Scenes of violence are spliced with Michael’s sentimental moonings over pictures of his embryonic children, demanding that we see the irony and feel the humanity of a thirtysomething who is only now beginning to see what life may be really all about and to start groping towards some kind of escape and betterment for the next generation.