This Is Our City is back after 17 months, and Cheryl is already blinking through tears in the Marbella sunshine while Michael moves Davy’s remains. Saoirse-Monica Jackson’s return as Cheryl lands the show in the same hard-edged register as before, only with a tighter chokehold on the people inside it.
Sean Bean’s Ronnie Phelan is still the catalyst for the damage, because the first series ended with Davy shot for leaking information about a drug deal and Michael plunging a kitchen knife into Ronnie’s pyjamas after the murder. That sequence left the second series with unfinished business rather than a clean reset, which is why the return feels like escalation rather than revival.
Álvaro Morte and Michael
James Nelson-Joyce’s Michael is trying to go straight, but the new series quickly pulls him back into the family business through Felipe, played by Álvaro Morte. Michael, Cheryl and Diana are all caught up in the conflict, and Felipe kidnaps them at gunpoint before locking them up in his poolside lair.
Felipe is not acting on random instinct. He is the younger brother of Ricardo, the Phelans’ former cocaine supplier, and he wants to know who killed Ricardo after Ricardo was run over at the end of the first series. The script gives that revenge plot a blunt edge, especially when Felipe says, “I hem yor fokin’ host,” after the kidnapping.
Shaun Evans as Ozzie Thompson
Shaun “Endeavour” Evans arrives as Ozzie Thompson, a sublimely chilly old lag who keeps asking questions about Ronnie. That gives the second series a new pressure point beyond the kidnapping plot, because the questions around Ronnie’s world are now coming from outside the family’s immediate circle.
The writing also keeps its grip on the domestic fallout through Hannah Onslow’s Diana and Stephen Walters’ Davy, with Cheryl’s line, “’Ee’s gone,” landing as more than a throwaway reaction. It is the kind of detail that makes the show work as crime drama rather than mere gangster decoration: the violence is still moving through kitchens, poolside hideouts and family loyalties, not just through plot mechanics.
Felipe’s unanswered demand
Felipe says he will not rest until he learns the “fockin’ truth!” about Ricardo’s death, and that leaves This Is Our City with a clean businesslike hook for the second series: the people who survived the first run now have to live with its consequences. The show’s strongest move is not simply bringing everyone back after 17 months, but putting Michael’s attempt to go straight under pressure from a revenge story that refuses to let the past stay buried.
