City on a Hill Tackles New Heights

Kevin Bacon leads the second season charge for an acclaimed crime drama

After an inaugural season of defending their professional territories and intentions, corrupt yet venerated FBI vet Jackie Rohr (Kevin Bacon) and idealistic District Attorney Decourcy Ward (Aldis Hodge) are determined to square off again in season two of City on a Hill.

But circumstances have shelved their inevitable standoff. After being outsmarted by the crime family he was putting away, and inadvertently allowing a murderer to slip free with full immunity, Ward’s political ambitions have crawled to halt and landed him in D.A. purgatory. And Rohr, who walks away unscathed despite being responsible for the death of a colleague through his meddling in a Boston P.D. operation, realizes that he may not be invincible after all. “He always has had a dark past and skeletons in his closet, but now he’s got two dead bodies on his hands,” says Bacon. “He also is feeling that his job security is threatened and that people would definitely like to shuffle him out. That’s making the ground underneath him very, very unstable.”

Quicker than you can say “misconduct” Rohr’s old tricks will put him and Ward on a collision course, with Ward champing at the bit to take his adversary down. “There’s some crazy Jackie insanity going on and it immediately breaks bad,” teases Bacon. “Right away, he realizes once again that he’s gone too far and that it’s like, ‘What am I going to do now?’ But this is a guy that is constantly trying to land on his feet. And I think that’s part of what’s fun about the show. I mean, how far can he go and how much can you get away with?”

Bacon, who is an exec producer on the Boston crime drama and directs the second-season opener, recalls his excitement for the nefarious Rohr when he first read the script. “I had been doing a bunch of characters that were men of very few words, which has its own challenges, and I looked at the first two pages [of City on a Hill] and it was a nonstop Jackie monologue. I was like, ‘This guy can’t shut up.’ This is a really interesting thing to explore, someone who really just has complete diarrhea of the mouth. For an actor, it’s an absolute blast.”

Adding directorial duties may have increased the workload but having a strong sense of his own character meant Bacon wasn’t fazed by the challenge. “In terms of directing myself, having lived in the first season in Jackie’s skin, I like to think that if I really understand a character, you can kind of throw anything at me, and I can just live in that moment as that guy,” he says. “Going back and forth was pretty seamless for me. It’s a lot of work—I’m not going to lie about that—but it felt good, and it felt energizing.”

Although set in the 1990s, numerous aspects of the series, from its overt misogyny to displays of blatant racism, still ring true today. During the lockdown, and inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, the writers added elements to the second season that show the slow progress of the American judiciary system. “When it comes to the environment, nothing has changed,” says Hodge. “I’m a Black man in America. I experience [racism] every single day. There’s really no escaping it. I’m an artist and I’m fortunate enough to create opportunities where I can use my art to facilitate my voice, my needs and hopefully communicate with people. This show is one of those venues where I can communicate with people what is going on and how it is going on. I’m proud to go to work every day and be able to step into Decourcy’s shoes and, with his mission, show what the fight is, how to fight from a different perspective, how to fight from the inside.”

What continues to fascinate Bacon about the series is that despite centring on fictitious characters, the narrative is based in historical fact. “What’s referred to in the script as the ‘Boston Miracle’ had to do with the fact that there’s a lot of violence on the streets and a lot of racial violence and corruption within the FBI and the Boston Police Department, and at this moment in time, things sort of turned around,” says Bacon. “When you look at this show and you look at what has once again become so painfully clear in terms of the systematic racism in this country, you kind of wonder, well, how far have we actually gone? This is supposed to be a period piece and we, especially this season, look at this situation and say to ourselves, ‘Well, thank God that we don’t operate in that way anymore.’ However, that’s not really the reality. It’s a good question: How far have we come? I don’t know.”

City on a Hill airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on Crave1