Remembering "Trinity" (1998)

Back in the day, when working class families still lived in Manhattan, it wasn't a crazy idea to make a TV show about them.

Thus was born the very, very, very short-lived series Trinity, about a working class Irish-Catholic family in Hell's Kitchen that ran for less than a month in the fall of 1998.

I vaguely remember when this show aired because it was during my senior year of college and I was living away from the city, pining for it from afar. If I'm correct, it aired on Friday nights so I wasn't really watching TV then but I think I caught a little of it once. It seemed like a heavy, intense drama about miserable white people and, apparently, it completely turned off audiences and was cancelled after only four episodes.

So why remember it? A few reasons.

First, it was a show about working class NYC, the kind of thing you don't really see today. It was about real people living real lives and, if it was airing today, I'd give it a chance.

Second, it was created by John Wells. He was the guy who created the massive TV hit ER just a few years earlier, and this show seemed like it could be another big, popular, and critically acclaimed success. Sadly it was not to be -- but years later he'd create (or re-create from the British version) the show Shameless that ran on Showtime for many years about another working class family (this time in Chicago).

Third, the cast. The patriarch of the family was played by the wonderful actor John Spencer who had appeared on LA Law a few years earlier -- and then, a year after Trinity was cancelled, would return in triumph with The West Wing, staying on it until his untimely death in 2006. Then there was Sam Trammell who, about a decade after this, would appear on the big vampire show True Blood. And yet another actor on the show who would go onto greatness was Bobby Cannavale who would later on appear on Boardwalk Empire and in lots of Marvel movies. 

So here's to Trinity, a forgotten NYC that had a brief, moment before its creators and stars went onto big things later on.