The construction of the glass box where Hillary Clinton would eventually concede the 2016 election may not seem like the stuff of riveting television. And sure enough, it’s not, at least in “The Westies,” the MGM+ drama about how the top Irish gang worked to profit from the construction of the Javits Center on the far edge of Manhattan. Despite the presence of veteran actors like JK Simmons and Titus Welliver as a local crime boss and the corrupt cop he keeps on the payroll, “The Westies” fails to offer a distinctive take on a well-worn genre.

Oscar winner Simmons plays Eamon Sweeney, a Hell’s Kitchen kingpin looking to parlay the Javits project into a gravy train for his associates, an interchangeable mob of young toughs with names like Sean and Connor. Sweeney’s vision requires making peace with the Italian mafia that far outnumbers his dwindling group, among them the skeptical and ascendant John Gotti (Hamish Allan-Headley), the most famous reminder that “The Westies” is (loosely) based on a real-life organization. (I wish “The Westies” were as transcendently awful as the 2018 biopic starring John Travolta as Gotti; instead, it’s just boring.) But that plan depends on a hot-headed group of violent thugs being kept in line, and on junior assistants like Sweeney’s protégé Jimmy Roarke (Tom Brittney, saddled with distracting sideburns) trusting their judgement.

Creators Chris Brancato and Michael Panes, who previously collaborated on the network series “The Godfather of Harlem,” could use the 1980s setting of “The Westies” to make more specific observations about the story’s time and place. The Javits Center, now home to New York Comic Con and other gatherings, represents an opportunity but also a displacement in the waning years of the Irish American population as a distinct ethnic bloc with its own physical enclaves. (Assimilation was already underway for several generations by the time of the Reagan Administration.) But rather than taking on a melancholy tone like “The Sopranos” and Tony’s famous declaration that “I’ve gotten to the end,” “The Westies” simply seems dated in its focus on the rowdy Irish, as if the Jets of “West Side Story” just kept it up for another 20 years and moved their battlefield a few blocks south. The rise of Colombian cocaine and other hard drugs serves as a nod to the times, but it is superficial.

“The Westies” also doesn’t have the immersive production design of recent projects like HBO’s “The Deuce,” which recreated porn-era Times Square in all its seedy glory. (It doesn’t help that filming took place in Ontario, which deprives “The Westies” of any authentic local texture.) Most of the news comes from Jimmy’s girlfriend Bridget (Sarah Bolger), a fugitive IRA fighter who rejoins the fight when her former comrade Brendan (Allen Leech) re-enters the picture. However, viewers looking for a nuanced interpretation of the Troubles would be much better off watching 2024’s “Say Nothing” than this tangential subplot.

But “The Westies” suffers more from a serious lack of compelling leads. Sweeney is the kind of cold-blooded pragmatist who has no problem killing one of his own for disobeying orders, as he does in the opening scene. It’s certainly more compelling in its logic than Jimmy’s blind loyalty to loose cannons like Mickey Flanagan (Stanley Morgan), a shell-shocked Vietnam veteran who has no business handling a gun and does so with predictably disastrous results. However, “The Westies” seem to lean more towards Jimmy’s side of tribal loyalty – even when that tribe is made up of murderers and thieves, there is no real reason to prefer them over those of other ethnicities.

Welliver’s Glenn Keenan, for example, isn’t just a corrupt cop reluctantly recruited by the FBI into a special task force targeting the Gambino crime family. He’s also a lazy, alcoholic father whose redemption isn’t an easy sell, even when Harry Bosch himself is doing the selling. The umpteenth time Glenn’s teenage son Danny (Aidan Wojtak-Hissong) begs him to go away and stop belatedly trying to fix things, you can’t help but nod your head. The same goes for the entire cast: “The Westies” makes audiences at best indifferent to whether Sweeney’s group can pocket millions through fraud and corruption, and at worst actively antagonistic. Meanwhile, the upbeat music that accompanies the sporadic action sequences (mainly beat-ups, although one involves an extremely ridiculous use of a rocket launcher) seems to suggest that they’re meant to be endearing, or at least enjoyable.

Simmons’ booming voice and wrinkle-eyed charm remain intact, even beneath a semi-period-appropriate newsboy cap. (sweeney is after all, a member of the old guard; (It’s not like he’s wearing Armani suits.) But “The Westies” isn’t a particularly compelling translation of his appeal into the language of prestige television, a la the short-lived sci-fi series “Counterpart,” or a clever positioning of Simmons as an amoral older mentor to a hungry young apprentice, a la his Oscar-winning role in “Whiplash.” It’s just a crime show about an uninteresting group of criminals whose dying lifestyle there is no reason to regret.

The first two episodes of “The Westies” will premiere on MGM+ on July 12 at 9 p.m. ET, with the remaining episodes airing weekly on Sundays.