Am I slightly psychopathic to be so obsessed with gangster TV?

Most of my favourite TV shows seem to involve gangsters in one way or another: The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Top Boy, The Offer (that brilliant series on Paramount+ about the making of The Godfather), series two of The White Lotus, Suburra, Gomorrah; even, you could argue, Game of Thrones (cod-medieval fantasy gangsters with dragons) and Succession (gangsters who don’t need to use guns).

Perhaps there’s something lightly psychopathic about being so allured by a genre which celebrates relentless, brutal killing, where the forces of law and order and civilisation are the enemy, and where the business model is to get stupidly rich at the expense of the desperately poor, addicted and hopeless. But I can’t be the only viewer with this vice, or TV execs wouldn’t keep commissioning stuff like Kin (originally on BBC1; second season now starting on Netflix).

Kin is, essentially, Gomorrah set in Dublin rather than Naples. The title is a pun on the name of our local crime family antiheroes – the Kinsellas – who you might feel at first owe slightly too much to the Corleones. There’s a hot-headed one (like Sonny), whose nickname is Viking and whose plot function is to get the family into a right old pickle with his intemperate aggression. And there’s the cool-headed, stone killer one – just like Al Pacino’s character Michael – who returns to the family after a spell away (only in prison, rather than in the army) to resolve their troubles like the remorseless, innocent-faced angel of death that he is.

Personally I don’t mind the clichés. Indeed, spotting them is part of the enjoyment: the millionaire thugs trapped in their gilded cage with their fancy cars and their entourages, never quite knowing if it’s their turn next; the chiaroscuro-shot money collection on the scuzzy, sinister tower block estates; the heroin shipment with the car boots, suitcases and storage warehouses; the sordid street killing; the innocent caught in the crossfire; the deal that goes horribly wrong.