Doesn’t it feel, somewhere deep down in your soul, like J.K. Simmons should have had a three-season cable or streaming drama where he plays the boss of an organized crime family by this point? (Excepting Oz, we guess, which was ahead of the curve on this, as in so many things.) You know the kind of show we’re thinking of: Simmons scowling from the preview thumbnails, casually dismantling lesser actors surrounding him? Circa, like, 2017? He probably gets shot at the end of the first season, in case contract negotiations get dicey? It’s so easy to imagine, in our minds.
Anyway: J.K. Simmons has now lined up a streaming series where he plays the boss of an organized crime family. Specifically, he’s set to star in The Westies, the new MGM+ show from creators Chris Brancato and Michael Panes (both from Godfather Of Harlem). Based on the actual Irish-American crime group, the show sounds like a bit of a period piece, set at a point in the 1980s where the construction of a new convention center in Hell’s Kitchen offers up hugely lucrative benefits for aspiring gangsters. Simmons will play Eamon Sweeney, a fictitious character presumably pulled from the lives of real Irish gangsters of the era like Mickey Spillane or Jimmy Coonan. From the description, though, he sounds like nothing so much as a J.K. Simmons character: “the charismatic but ruthless leader of The Westies, whose old-school charm and neighborhood loyalty mask fierce criminal ambition and calculated brutality.” Yeah, we’ve met that guy.
Simmons is no stranger to TV, of course; he currently stars in Invincible, and co-starred with Sissy Spacek in Prime Video’s Night Sky a couple of years back. (To say nothing of various smaller stints and cameos he offers up pretty regularly.) Still, there’s something so specifically “older actor of a certain age getting a show where he plays a charismatic but awful person” about this that we can’t help but be mildly amused by it—even if we’re also probably going to check The Westies out because, hey: J.K. Simmons is in it.
[via Variety]