Since I started C&L back in September of 2004, I was dealing with severe nerve damage which cratered my music career and nearly destroyed my life. I was pretty much confined to my C&L bat cave most of the time because most movements just hurt too much. Thankfully, I'm starting to improve finally, but because I was a bubble boy, I probably watched way more streaming video than any person ever should. And what I found was that there are great shows not only on Netflix, but Amazon Prime and Hulu/Hulu+ as well, and I decided I would start imparting some of the gems that I had uncovered while being house bound.

For my first pick, I'm going with a very cool Irish quasi-mob/druggie series called Love/Hate that originally aired on RTE TV and can be viewed on Hulu.. I say quasi because if you've watched the Sopranos, you know how a mob operates, but these drug kingpins of Dublin are more or less a gang made up of all Christophers instead of Tonys -- if you get my meaning.

But it's still a hell of a series.

Love/Hate is an RTE show that has had three high-rating and prize-winning runs in the Republic of Ireland since 2010, with a fourth tranche to be broadcast later this year.

Love/Hate is a gangster story that suggests the dominant influence on Irish showmakers is American rather than British television. You can imagine it having been pitched as an Irish version of The Wire, to which David Caffrey's direction of the opening episodes seems to allude in the sweeping panoramas of the dockside and financial district of Dublin.

There are also echoes of The Sopranos in the presentation of the tensions between professional violence and personal tenderness: at one point, a child's birthday party, a court case and the arrival of a massive stash of smuggled crack are happening simultaneously.