Titus Welliver’s ‘The Westies’ Almost Never Existed as Its Own Show, Creator Reveals
Forest Whitaker’s Bumpy Johnson has ruled the small screen for four seasons on ‘Godfather of Harlem,’ and now MGM+ is widening that same criminal underworld with a brand new series. ‘The Westies’ is Chris Brancato and Michael Panes’ third MGM+ series, following ‘Godfather of Harlem’ and ‘Hotel Cocaine.’ The timing is notable, since the flagship crime drama is currently gearing up for a proper sendoff.
‘Godfather of Harlem’ will conclude with a two hour series finale that wraps its four season saga about the 1960s Harlem gangster, with production on that finale beginning July 10 in Brooklyn. Meanwhile, ‘The Westies’ is set in the early 1980s, when construction of the Jacob Javits Convention Center on the gang’s Hell’s Kitchen turf promises a financial windfall for the Irish American crime family, despite the group being outnumbered fifty to one by the Five Families of the Italian mafia.
As it turns out, this new show was never supposed to stand on its own. According to series creator Chris Brancato, the central gang in ‘The Westies’ were originally meant to oppose Forest Whitaker’s character in ‘Godfather of Harlem.’ In his own words, “On The Godfather of Harlem, we generally choose a group to oppose Forest Whitaker’s character, Bumpy Johnson. I was speaking with Michael Wright about Season 4 and said we should bring in the Westies.”
That casual pitch quickly turned into something much bigger. Brancato recalled that after he floated the idea to MGM+’s Michael Wright, Wright stopped him and said he would do a whole show about the Westies, a moment Brancato shared in an interview with Deadline. From there, the pair realized they had an opportunity to build a series around a little known Irish gang that flourished in New York City from the 1960s through the 1980s.
The ‘Westies’ cast includes Academy Award winner J.K. Simmons, Tom Brittney, Jessica Frances Dukes and Titus Welliver in leading roles. Welliver’s co-stars also include Stanley Morgan, Sarah Bolger, Allen Leech, Hamish Allan-Headley, Vincent Walsh and Hilary McCormack. The show explores how the group tries to use its leverage to secure a fragile truce while navigating a generational divide that eventually pulls the FBI deeper into its investigation of the Italian mafia.
Brancato has described the Westies as fascinating precisely because of their instability. He noted that if the Italian groups counted as organized crime, the Westies were disorganized crime, numbering only around twenty members yet cutting a wide swath through New York while working both alongside and against the Italian families. That contradiction, paired with the gang’s self destructive streak, is what convinced the creative team the story deserved its own eight episode season rather than a supporting role in someone else’s.
With ‘Godfather of Harlem’ wrapping up and ‘The Westies’ premiering July 12, MGM+ appears to be handing the reins of its crime universe to a new set of antiheroes. Now that you know Bumpy Johnson’s would be rivals almost stayed background players, does ‘The Westies’ have what it takes to fill the void ‘Godfather of Harlem’ leaves behind?
