Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s City On a Hill Trailer Is Here
The duo are producing the Boston-based police drama.
Photo via AP
Our first look at City On a Hill, the latest adventure in cinematography from pride of Boston duo Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, has arrived. The first trailer for the duo’s Showtime police drama series dropped Thursday.
It has some, um, familiar tropes for anyone familiar with the Boston drama formula. It of course involves crooked cops, Charlestown bank robbers in hockey masks, hard-boiled dialogue, grit, accents—the works. It all unfolds against the backdrop of the so-called “Boston Miracle,” the 1990s effort to rein in gun violence in the city. Affleck and Damon do not appear in the show, but are involved as producers. The two are also collaborating on a movie about a McDonald’s Monopoly scheme.
City On a Hill will also take a look at race in Boston, circa 1992. It shows white FBI investigator Jackie Rohr, played by Kevin Bacon, butting heads with a black colleague named Decourcy Ward, played by Aldis Hodge, who Bacon’s character derides as an “affirmative action hire.” Ward is sickened by the city’s good old boys network and is setting off on a campaign to confront it. “I wanna rip out the machinery in this bullshit city,” he says. “I wanna tear it all down.”
Per the trailer, there’s plenty of machinery that needs ripping out. Members of law enforcement banter about looking the other way on certain crimes, stacks of cash are seen changing hands, barrels of some kind of contraband are dumped into the water, blood is hosed out of the back of a white van, and so on.
There are a few Boston backdrops that make cameos in the video, including its last few seconds, in which the show’s stars can be seen raising a glass at The Last Hurrah, the classic Omni Parker House watering hole.
