Principal Characters & Performances
Michael Kinsella
Michael Kinsella is the second of Bren Kinsella’s two sons, home in Dublin after a long prison sentence and known as the Magician. The first episode gives him a welcome-home party; the rest of the run asks him to keep paying for the family that threw it. He is the one who can do the killing, and the one who least wants to.
Charlie Cox plays him, and the performance is built on the gap between the soft voice and what it does. Critics kept reaching for the same observation: gentle until the moment he is not. Cox was the show’s exportable name, and he stayed with it across both series.
Michael’s run is the slow loss of the ordinary life he left prison wanting. He is barred from his daughter Anna because he caused her mother’s death, and by the end of series one he is the man sent to shoot Eamon Cunningham in a Spanish car park. Series two puts him between Anna and his own father.
Amanda Kinsella
Amanda Kinsella is married to Jimmy, mother to Jamie and Anthony, and runs the family’s beauty salon. She begins on the edge of the business, and the first series turns on the discovery that she is better at it than any of the men: when Jamie is killed she is the one who decides to rob Cunningham’s drugs.
Clare Dunne has won the IFTA for lead actress in a drama twice for the part, in 2022 and 2024. She plays grief and calculation as the same thing, so Amanda’s move from mourner to operator never looks like a switch being thrown.
By the end of series one Amanda is the winner of a war she was never supposed to be in. By the end of series two she is running the business, with a Turkish alliance and a dead brother-in-law to show for it.
Frank Kinsella
Frank Kinsella is the oldest of the siblings and the head of the family, a position he holds by default rather than appetite. He is the one who negotiates with Eamon Cunningham, and the one caught between the cartel and his own nephew’s hunger for revenge. Aidan Gillen plays him as a man doing paperwork in the middle of a war.
Gillen had been the Dublin gangster before, as John Boy in Love/Hate, and Frank is the quieter version of that type: reluctant, efficient, prone to sudden violence. Series one strips him of authority and leaves him overdosing; series two has his brother Bren beat him down until he shoots Bren and then himself.
Notable Support and Guest Stars
Ciarán Hinds is Eamon Cunningham, the cartel boss the Kinsellas go to war with in series one, and he is frightening by doing very little. Hinds won the IFTA for supporting actor for the part, and the Irish press called his Cunningham one of the great Irish television villains.
Emmett J. Scanlan is Jimmy, Amanda’s husband and Michael’s brother, the hot half of the pair. Francis Magee is Bren, the family’s actual monster, released from prison at the start of series two to take apart what the others have built. Maria Doyle Kennedy is Birdy, Frank’s sister and the family’s matriarch; she won the IFTA for supporting actress in both 2022 and 2024.
Sam Keeley won the 2022 IFTA for lead actor as Eric Kinsella, called Viking. Yasmin Seky was named best newcomer by the Royal Television Society as Nikita Murphy, and Hannah Adeogun plays Anna, Michael’s daughter. None of them has a page on A Cup of Crime, so every cast row carries a name.
The World of Kin
Kin is set in the Dublin that was rebuilt for money. The Kinsellas are small and live in Dublin 4 in the shadow of the Aviva Stadium, while Eamon Cunningham, who is not small, does his business from the rooftop bar of a hotel by the docklands and the International Financial Services Centre.
The family’s base is a beauty salon, run as a front and used for its books, and the house Jimmy and Amanda share is bought with money the series never quite accounts for. The Gardaí appear, but they are scenery: this is a story told from inside one household rather than from a station.
It was filmed in Dublin, down to the Furry Bog in Whitechurch standing in for the family’s local, and the city is shot as a noir of glass and water. The Irish Times decided Dublin was a glorified screensaver and that the story could be relocated to Dundee without changing anything.
Origin Story
Kin began with Peter McKenna, a writer from Kilkenny who had spent years reading about Irish gangland and was struck less by the money than by how the country treats the men who make it. By November 2020 it was announced as an RTÉ drama with Charlie Cox, Clare Dunne and Aidan Gillen attached.
McKenna wrote all sixteen episodes and co-created the series with Ciarán Donnelly. It was made by Metropolitan Films for BRON Studios and Headline Pictures, in association with RTÉ, AMC and the Nordic Entertainment Group. David Holmes wrote the theme; Diarmuid Goggins and Tessa Hoffe directed the first series, and Felix Thompson, Christine Molloy, Joe Lawlor and Kate Dolan the second.
Before it aired, the Irish papers said it was inspired by the Kinahan and Hutch feud; McKenna denied it, insisting nobody in it resembled either family.
RTÉ One began the first series on Sunday 12 September 2021 at 9.30pm, three days after AMC+ put it out as an original.
Narrative Style & Tone
Kin is an eight-part serial each time, with no case of the week and no detective at its centre. The first series is the Kinsellas against a cartel, and the second is the Kinsellas against themselves once the debt and the alliances of the win have to be paid.
McKenna’s writing is about grief and money rather than procedure, which is why the police get scenes and never the plot. Violence arrives suddenly and is over in seconds, and the aftermath, meaning the morgue, the month’s mind mass and the funeral, is given far more room than the shooting.
David Holmes wrote the score, and the look is expensive: widescreen Dublin, drone work over the Liffey and the Poolbeg chimneys, colour graded away from daylight. The pacing is the argument. Series one was accused of stretching to fill eight hours; series two was accused of rushing to close them.
How is Kin remembered?
It was a hit at home and, unusually for an Irish drama of its period, it travelled: the first episode averaged 500,600 viewers on RTÉ One, beating Love/Hate’s debut, and RTÉ later reported more than four million streams.
At the 2022 IFTAs Kin took six prizes, including best drama and a clean sweep of all four television acting categories; at the 2024 IFTAs it took five more, with Kate Dolan named best drama director. Rotten Tomatoes gives the first series a 100 per cent approval score.
Not everyone was convinced. The first series ended with a finale so close to the last act of The Godfather that the Irish Times called it a shameless rip-off; the second drew reviews complaining that Dublin was only a moody backdrop.
BRON Studios went bankrupt and Kin stopped for three years. The BBC bought it in 2023, Netflix took it in May 2024, and in July 2026 RTÉ confirmed a third series, from Metropolitan Pictures and House of Juno, for 2027.
In Closing
Kin keeps the family first and the crime second, which is why it works when it works: the love and the money are the same argument, and the winner is the person nobody watched. Two series in, Amanda Kinsella is still standing.
