You can’t tell the players without a scorecard, and the series doesn’t provide one. But he also can’t overcome the weaknesses in Simon and Zorzi’s script, which takes on so many characters that they’re all reduced to representative ciphers. While Isaac’s performance is magnificent, the series’ highlight is an almost unrecognizable turn by Catherine Keener as elderly resident Mary Dorman, whose racist opposition begins to soften when she gets a whiff of the opposition’s humanity.ĭirector Paul Haggis’ presence is largely invisible, although the homiletic tendencies of “Crash” poke through when he uses a split lens to literally shove the 911 messages on Nick’s beeper in the audience’s face. The faceless whites whose barely coded language explodes into outright bigotry as they fight the incursion of people whose “lifestyle” differs from their own are the bad guys, but they’re also pawns, their emotions frothed by cynical politicians whose vision goes no farther than the next election. ‘Bad Things’ Review: Queer ‘Shining’ Is a Refreshing Twist on SlashersĪlthough it has a central figure in Oscar Isaac’s Nick Wasicsko, the Yonkers mayor who becomes an almost inadvertent champion of the new housing, “Hero” has no heroes, nor even villains. It’s a story whose tension comes to a head in city council meetings and court rulings, tracking the slow grind of bureaucracy as people’s lives disintegrate and are sometimes rebuilt. Over the course of six hour-long episodes, aired two at a time beginning this Sunday, “Show Me a Hero” takes us through the arduous, seven-year-long process (from 1987 to 1994) of installing and populating new public housing units in the middle-class neighborhoods on Yonkers’ largely white east side, undoing decades of deliberate segregation which clustered poor, mostly nonwhite residents in projects on the opposite side of the Saw Mill River Parkway. Based on Lisa Belkin’s nonfiction book about the battle to desegregate public housing in Yonkers, New York, it’s a story about politics in which characters figure incidentally, and not the other way around. “ Show Me a Hero,” the miniseries Simon authored with his longtime collaborator, Bill Zorzi, employs no such subterfuge. David Simon has admitted that he essentially tricked HBO into greenlighting “The Wire” by pitching them a cop show and only later revealing his plan to devote each season to a different area of Baltimore society.
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