With his new book World Gone By just published, Mystic River author Dennis Lehane has told RTÉ TEN that he will find out in the next two months whether his US adaptation of Love/Hate, which is set in Hawaii, has received the green light for a pilot.
Lehane, who has written the adaptation for Showtime, said he was "blown away" by the RTÉ crime drama when he watched all the seasons on DVD in Hawaii.
"Love/Hate is really an anthropological study of a part of the world that is misrepresented in the public consciousness, which is Dublin," he said.
"People outside of Dublin think that Dublin is filled with people who wear wool sweaters and sit around twee pubs and drink Guinness and sing songs."
The Gone Baby Gone and Shutter Island writer continued: "What Love/Hate showed was that no, there's a part of that culture that's like Trainspotting meets Goodfellas – banging it out on the streets and shooting each other up on the estates. And wow, there's a prodigious drug problem – we didn't know that.
"Although it's never said, I think it's very much about Ireland after the Tiger died."
Lehane explained: "So to do justice to Love/Hate is not to do a show about drugs: it's to do a show about a culture. And the culture that I decided to set it in was the culture of West Oahu in Hawaii, which is a surf culture, which is a very poor culture, which is a very angry culture – it has a crystal meth problem. These are not people who say, 'Thank you for making us the 50th state', they're saying, 'We would like our country back'."
He added: "So I thought there's similar issues going on sociologically in Love/Hate [that] would fit in that area. So that was my stroke to set it there.
"Of course, the first time you hear it you go, 'That's insane' – it's like setting it on Mars – but the similarities are amazing."
As to his experiences watching Love/Hate, he said: "It's a really smart show. It's beautifully acted and as the budgets got bigger, as the show became successful, you could see it really flower. It's terrific. It's a real joy to be in that world and transposing these Irish lads to their Hawaiian counterparts."
Lehane said the Stuart Carolan-created show was "an eye-opener" for him on Dublin that brought with it "a sense of 'Oh my God'".
"Even me, who knows a fair bit about Irish culture, didn't realise that this was going on to the degree the show shows it's going on," he said. "And that's what I realised; that's the appeal of the show. It's, 'Oh, that's what this is about'.
"All the underpinnings and the trappings and the 'gift-wrapping' I call it that might be, 'Oh, it's about drugs' or 'It's about this or it's about that'... The great shows are always about something grand and sociological, if not anthropological. They're about a society now – right now – and that's what Love/Hate does."
