...get a strange twinge of recognition and déja vu when you first saw Billy Lush's "Nick" character sitting at the bar when he first shows up in Low Winter Sun?
Lush is playing the same sort of centerless, "stuck" or "damaged" character in Nick as he did as Kevin Donnelly. The bar setting I found also eerily reminiscent of the same bar-as-center-of-illicit-operations role as the bar The Black Donnellys ran.
I saw it when it originally aired and liked it, though I thought it was a tad lackluster. I feel the same way about "Low Winter Sun". I didn't notice any similarities because it's been so long since I've seen "The Black Donnellys". Maybe I'll re-watch it at some point. I remember it was cancelled part way into the season, so NBC made the rest of the episodes available to stream on their website, one per week at the same time they would have aired. That takes me back...
shareNever saw either one of these series when they first aired (although I now vaguely remember the NBC marketing campaigne when they were pitching "The Black Donnellys").
Netflix Streaming seems to be a place for short-lived series that never got a chance to make it to live again - even if it's just for another abbreviated season.
One nice thing about Netflix Streaming is that you can binge-watch a few episodes at a time, which helps with the story and character development rather than wait a week in-between each episode. (It also helps to not have 15 minutes of commercials in every hour of programming breaking up the continuity.)
I had watched "The Black Donnellys" on Netflix just a couple of months ago and when Billy Lush played a similar directionless character in "Low Winter Sun" - and in another crime-fronting bar no less! - it just kind of stood out for me.
(BTW, when checking out his imdb.com filmography to see what else he has been in, I was similarly surprised to see he was the undercover cop in "The Chicago Code," another cancelled-before-its-time series which has found a home on Netflix Streaming...)