Bad Blood

Season two pivots to a different question. With the Rizzuto generation gone, who inherits? Declan Gardiner is a working-class Irish-Canadian fixer who has spent a lifetime being the useful outsider in an Italian family. Watching him try to hold a Cosa Nostra operation together while the Hells Angels and the Calabrians close in from outside and the cops press from inside is a study in how power transfers, and how it doesn't.

The show is also, quietly, about Canada. The Rizzuto clan was real. The cross-border flow of money and bodies between Montreal, New York, and Sicily was real. Bad Blood treats organised crime as a Canadian story rather than an imported American one. That alone makes it different from almost everything else in the genre.

🎨 Style & Atmosphere

Visually the show is cold. Montreal winters and grey light, dark interiors everywhere. The camera likes long hallways and empty warehouses, and the violence, when it arrives, is blunt rather than operatic. This is not the sun-drenched Naples of Gomorrah or the neon excess of Narcos. Bad Blood looks like Canada feels in February. I watched season one over two nights and the visual flatness actually helps, because it puts the characters first and lets LaPaglia do his work without the show selling him too hard.

The soundtrack leans on Italian-Canadian diaspora choices. Family dinners with too many people at the table and coffee in small cups. There is a wedding that turns into a wake, because of course there is. The world-building is specific enough that it never feels like a generic mob set.

Where the show stretches is in its soapier instincts. There are affairs and there are double-crosses, and there are the convenient coincidences that tidy up when the plot needs them. Critics compared it unfavourably to The Sopranos and Boardwalk Empire, and fairly so. It does not reach those heights. But few shows do, and judging a Canadian six-parter against prestige HBO is a slightly rigged contest.

📈 Reception & Legacy

Reception was split between the seasons. Season one was well received, particularly for LaPaglia, who took home the Canadian Screen Award for Best Actor in a Drama. Critics praised the research under the story and the restraint of the central performance.

Season two was harder sold. Without LaPaglia as the anchor, with a fictional lead stepping into the space a real historical figure had occupied, the show became more conventional and the soap elements surfaced. Netflix picking the series up internationally gave it a second life, but the cancellation after two seasons suggests the audience never quite followed the pivot.

Praised for LaPaglia's quiet, watchful Vito Rizzuto. Criticised for letting the soap take over once he left.

In the broader genre it sits alongside Kin as a show that treats organised crime as a regional story rather than a mythic American one. Fans of Peaky Blinders will recognise the old-patriarch-to-new-muscle handoff, and fans of Ozark will recognise the slow grind of a family trying not to be crushed.

🏆 Why It Works

Bad Blood works when it trusts its research. I'd recommend season one on LaPaglia's performance alone, and on the fact that the story beneath it is real. The book is there on the shelf. The murders happened. The families existed. That gravity carries the first six episodes even when the filmmaking is more workmanlike than inspired.

Season two is a different watch. Coates is magnetic and he earns his lead role, but the show has loosened its grip on the source material and drifted toward melodrama. If you come in knowing that, and you treat it as a spin-off about the Gardiner character rather than a continuation of the Rizzuto story, it plays better.

Twelve episodes across two seasons, one run excellent and the other trying. For a country that rarely gets to make its own mob show, that is not a bad trade. Watch season one for LaPaglia. Stay for Coates if the handover lands for you.