Drab greys dominate the frame as two teenagers hang around outside a dingy block of flats. They’re young, smiling, joking – until one of them says he has to kill someone. But first, a practice run. With chilling bravado, he removes a gun from his bag and fires off a round of bullets, hitting a cat, sending blood flying in all directions. 

The teenager laughs hysterically as he slaughters the animal. This is good crack!
No-one comes running. There are no sirens. No repercussions either. What’s a dead cat? As the plaintive blues of Blind Willie Johnson’s chilling ‘Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground’ begin to play, the immortal words of Robert Towne, in the John Huston epic, seem extraordinarily apt. “Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown.”
Except, it’s Dublin. And Love/Hate is back.

The award-winning RTÉ crime drama, written by Stuart Carolan and directed by David Caffrey, retuned to our television screens last Sunday for its fourth series. Judging by the power of the first episode, it promises to be yet another taut, emotionally draining but utterly compelling viewing experience.
This is the lie of the land. 
Gangland boss Nidge, played by Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, is a paranoid wreck, both nervously wired and eerily calm, emotionally cut-off from his surroundings. Tommy (Killian Scott) has woken up from a coma, brain-damaged  – and so has become a liability. Foul-mouthed joker Fran (Peter Coonan) isn’t kidding around when he heads up a tiger kidnapping. And there’s a new sheriff in town in the shape of Detective Mick Moynihan (Brian F. O’Byrne), whose calm, confident but manipulative demeanour has already marked him out as a worthy opponent for the Dublin criminals.
With so much drama and tension on-screen in the first of six episodes, viewers were barely given time to mourn the death of the show’s most beloved character, Darren, who was also – if the phrase has any meaning in the context – Love/Hate’s (inevitably twisted) moral compass. 
Actor Robert Sheehan appears only briefly in the new series: as a body in the morgue, his head bloodied, his eyes blank, trademark blue hoodie nowhere to be seen. Over the course of the first three series, he’d been a love interest, a protective brother, a sensitive soul, and – alongside all of that – a vicious hitman. Sheehan’s multi-faceted performance – not to mention that model-like face – won him rave reviews, and left fans wondering how the show could go on after he’d been blown away in the third season finale. But of course every series of this type has to lose characters along the way. It goes with the territory.
Writer and creator Stuart Carolan acknowledges that he felt the loss personally while writing the new series. Darren was his creation. And he had become the show’s emotional benchmark.
“It’s true,” Carolan reflects. “I found this series very difficult to write, without Darren acting as the centre of the show. He was a point-of-view character with such a sense of morality – even though he had the highest body count of all the characters! There was this constant sense that he actually wanted to do the right thing. 
“He’s reckless, but from the start he’s grieving for his brother, and he’s always looking out for his family. He always feels what he does. When he accidentally shoots Lizzie’s brother Paddy, he realises what he’s done and he worries about her. I see him as a fallen angel.”
Losing Darren had always been on the cards. Carolan was well aware of Robert Sheehan’s rising profile in the UK and the States, and had accepted that the young actor would have to follow the siren call of Hollywood when it came. In fact, Carolan had actually expected Sheehan to exit Love/Hate after series two.
“At the end of shooting series two, Robbie moved off to London,” Carolan recalls. “I really didn’t expect him to be available for the third series, so we wrote an ending that seemed apt. But I met him and he was up for doing series three, one hundred percent, which was fantastic. It meant a lot, because I really wanted to finish his character’s story. Not all characters’ stories end in death, but his felt like that was the way it had to go. I found it very emotional, and very difficult.”
Where Darren had previously been the beating human heart in an often relentlessly bleak world, there was now a void. The challenge for Carolan was to develop other characters who could fill that Darren-shaped hole and restore the missing humanity to the wasteland of gangland violence. Luckily Love/Hate’s characters are so brilliantly developed that concentrating on their emotional arcs still makes for gripping drama. 
“Nidge didn’t pull the trigger on Darren,” explains Carolan, “but he lost Darren, and he’s in an emotionally dark place. I felt it was important to give a bit of humanity back to Nidge. He’s always been a very complex figure, but without being sentimental, we needed to see his humanity again, even if it’s been corrupted and corroded. 
“You need to have some characters with a sense of morality, and we always had that, even in smaller characters and in little vignettes. So in this series, you get that from Brian F. O’Byrne, who plays Detective Mick Moynihan, and you’ll also get it from Charlie Murphy’s character, Siobhán, who has always had this beautiful sense of morality. Her point of view will fill the void that the death of Robbie Sheehan’s character has left.”
The women characters in Love/Hate have generally been complex and interesting – none more so than Lizzie, who’s brilliantly played by Dublin actress Caoilfhionn Dunne. The sister of IRA members, Lizzie was introduced as a meek, almost childlike character with a fierce loyalty to her family and a serious crush on Darren. These emotions came into conflict when Darren accidentally killed her brother Paddy; she took it on herself to wreak revenge. Emerging in last season’s finale with a shaved head, a gun and a steely gaze, her daylight murder of the beautiful boy she loved came as a huge shock to the audience, many of whom were devastated.
In the aftermath of the screening of Love/Hate, Caoilfhionn Dunne was made well aware of their feelings – especially those of Robert Sheehan’s female fans.
“When I got the script, I was a bit gobsmacked, and excited – and scared!” admits Dunne. “I mean, it’s such a huge responsibility, taking out the lead character of a show. I immediately just thought, ‘They’re going to hate me!’ I remember thinking it was bad enough that Lizzie was spending so much time with Darren. I thought, ‘If girls don’t like me when our characters are just hanging out – they’re going to hate me when I kill him!’ 
“Girls can be very extreme in their responses to what they see on TV. During the first few episodes, when Lizzie was just hanging out with Darren, I was around Dublin preparing for King Lear in the Abbey, and I heard a lot of it – girls walking by me going: ‘You tramp, you slut.’ And of course it’s worse online, because people have the anonymity to say anything. 
“Then after the finale, people were pissed,” she adds. “I was called all sorts of names by both girls and boys. And some of it was because they loved Darren, and he was the moral centre. But some was girls just hating me.”
Dunne’s accounts of personal attacks echo sentiments expressed by Anna Gunn in a recent column in The New York Times. The Emmy-winning actress, who plays Skyler in Breaking Bad, wrote a searing piece about the vitriol that was levelled, not only at her character, but also at the actress herself.  
Gunn argued that the vitriol wasn’t about her character, but rather reflected a misogyny-laden attitude towards complex women in pop culture.  “My character, to judge from the popularity of websites and Facebook pages devoted to hating her,” she wrote, “has become a flash point for many people’s feelings about strong, non-submissive, ill-treated women. But I finally realized that most people’s hatred of Skyler had little to do with me and a lot to do with their own perception of women and wives. Because Skyler didn’t conform to a comfortable ideal of the archetypical female, she had become a kind of Rorschach test for society, a measure of our attitudes toward gender.”
Carolan confirms that he’s become increasingly aware of these often skewed perceptions of female characters. Through his writing, he’s been trying to consign the one-dimensional characters audiences are too often presented with to history.
“I think it’s a huge issue,” he observes. “I’ve found that what often happens regarding female characters is that someone will make a point about them, and others will follow it blindly, regardless of the evidence to the contrary. These women are strong, but often in subtle ways. They’re complex, because they’re real. It’s not about having so-called ‘strong’ characters, right out of a Maya Angelou book. But Ruth Bradley’s character is a tigress: she protects her family, she is – or was – a moral compass for Darren and she stands up to Nidge. 
“But at the same time, when she’s being stalked and threatened by Luke, there’s a scene where she sits down with Darren and says. ‘You already warned him. You brought him into the house; you need to fix him.’ And she knows what that means. She’s basically very quietly asking her brother to kill someone, even though she’s against that way of life. But her kids are under threat.”
Carolan makes the point that all the lead female characters on the show have elements of strength and weakness. Like the men, he adds. But he’s found that audiences resist acknowledging the positive traits of the women, quickly dismissing them as obstacles who merely serve to get in the way of men’s plans.
“There’s another character Donna, who stands up to Nidge after Siobhan’s rape,” he recalls. “She’s threatened in a really nasty way, when Nidge says he’ll throw acid in her face. But she does this incredibly brave thing and goes and reports it anyway. But almost no-one perceived it that way, because she wasn’t a one-note, mythic ‘Strong Woman’. 
“She can be complex; she can be bitchy and gossipy and not able to keep a secret – but her actions can be strong. She’s just one example for you, when you also have Lizzie and Siobhan and all these other very interesting female characters. But they’re not afforded the same recognition as the men – who are also both weak and strong.”
Caoilfhionn Dunne acknowledges the accuracy of this statement. She’s adamant that this internalised misogyny shouldn’t prevent writers from delivering complex female roles that don’t quite fit the usual cookie-cutter standard – or actresses from taking them on.
“It’s such a shame when there are female characters like that or like Lizzie, and women in particular start to hate her,” she rues. “It’s crazy. She’s interesting and complex and doing something different, and I just want to say, ‘She’s flying the flag here ladies! Get on board!’ It’s a shame. 
“I certainly hope this kind of reaction, and the personal attacks, don’t put actresses off playing interesting characters, or make writers play it safe and only write interesting male characters, because they know men will look at them as heroes and women will look at them like love interests. 
“There’s a question mark over what constitutes a great female character that women can get on board with. If you’re not stunningly beautiful and also ‘one of the girls’, there’s a backlash, and you’re somehow seen as a threat to women.”

No matter how many snide asides she receives from jealous and indignant fangirls of Robbie Sheehan, Caolfhionn Dunne is determined to explore the darker realities facing her character. She considers Love/Hate to be one of the only shows brave enough to address the serious issues of crime, violence and drugs in Ireland. 
“I was always aware of this stuff,” she says. “I grew up in Finglas and you’d always hear about them. You wouldn’t always see them, but you’d see the ripple effects; the drug protests in Ballymun and the violence in Finglas that was escalating just as I left the area.”
Since its very first episode, when the lead actors were criticised for being too good-looking to believably portray criminals, Love/Hate has had to fight accusations of glamourising violence. It’s a criticism that actress Aoibhinn McGinty, who plays Nidge’s wife Trish, dismisses as ridiculous.
“I’ve said this before: I think the only thing that’s ‘glamorous’ about the show is that it’s on television,” she observes. “If somebody thinks what we depict is glamorous then they need to look that word up for themselves! It’s very sad. Nobody is going around delighted with themselves.”
Dunne considers some of the hand-wringing surrounding the show to be mere headline fodder – a non-existent issue created by sensationalist media desperately looking to be offended. But she also believes there’s a fear of recognising the accuracy of the events portrayed. Ireland, she says, has a great talent for burying our collective heads in the sand about societal issues. many of us would rather rather pretend that Love/Hate is merely melodramatic fiction, rather than a reflection of the kind of stuff that has really been happening on the streets of our cities.
“We’ve never been a great nation for discussing things. So when you show these things on screen – drugs, violence, sexual violence, suicide – it’s a mirror being held up. And I think in an attempt to push that reality further away they pretend it’s glamorised, and not real. 
“I don’t see these conversations happening about Breaking Bad or The Sopranos, because it’s in the States. It’s far away, so it’s grand. It’s not us, it’s them. So we can sit and watch and have a cup of tea and feel safe that that’s not us.”
Carolan is also quick to point out that unlike violent episodic series, Love/Hate very explicitly shows the emotional repercussions of violence, and the cyclical nature of crime. No-one in Love/Hate gets an easy ride.
“From the very first episode, when Darren’s brother gets killed, we see the grief. We see the horror. We see sisters holding their dead brother, wailing and gnashing teeth. There are very real moments of grief – and of emotional repercussions. It’s not a shoot-em-up and move on kind of show.”
Some of the outrage – purported or genuine – could be explained by the show’s graphic approach to violence and sex. It’s a first for Irish television. But Carolan is quick to point out that RTÉ aren’t just upping the ante for Irish programming, but network television in general.
“It’s so important to note that we’re essentially on network television, not cable. Everyone now looks at shows like Breaking Bad and assumes that there’s a right to see shows that are graphic with a level of violence or sex or language, but that’s not the case. 
“There’s no way you’d get Love/Hate on BBC or UTV or one of the mainstream channels. Even in the States – the reason there was that huge controversy surrounding Janet Jackson’s breast being exposed at the Superbowl was because it was network television. All the ground-breaking graphic shows like Breaking Bad or The Sopranos in America are shown on HBO and cable, so it’s huge for us to be able to show Love/Hate on RTÉ. They’ve been incredibly supportive from day one.”
The writer is keen that RTÉ should continue to encourage this type of programming, and hopes that Irish television will follow America’s footsteps in creating complex and boundary-pushing drama. He also warns against copying the UK model, where programming is still far below the standard of their United States counterparts. The British industry, he believes, has yet to produce a show worthy of the recent television renaissance.
“This idea of it being the Golden Age of television is great for writers,” he reflects, “as it creates a demand and a standard. But I do think it’s important that we go that way, instead of the UK model. In the UK, the shows that are prioritised and put at the top of the schedule – the primetime slots, almost – are the soap operas. And it all trickles down. You have a huge amount of people writing drama now who’ve worked on Coronation Street and Eastenders and Holby City. Consequently, you’ll have producers and scriptwriters looking for heavy-handed moments. But in the US there are cable networks like HBO that demand drama that’s subtle and intelligent, but also boundary-pushing. And therefore more writers will go on that journey. It’s so important for stories to be told, because it all trickles down and becomes part of the television culture and philosophy.”
Though neither Carolan nor the actors are revealing any future plot points, the writer does confirm that the IRA will still be involved in the new series, and that the audience may also find their loyalties divided between the gang and the Gardai. But no matter how vicious the characters’ actions become, Carolan states that there will always be moments of redemption to be found.
“There’s a darkness in the story, and you have to be truthful to that,” he acknowledges. “There are characters within it who survive no matter what – not to give you hope, necessarily, but to show you just that there are survivors in life. Some people thrive no matter what. 
“But there’s more love in the show than hate,” he concludes. “There’s a huge amount of love in show, which is there in these tiny little moments. But it builds up. At least I hope it does!”

Love/Hate airs on RTÉ One every Sunday at 9.30pm.