Show Me a Hero

Show Me a Hero always feels thrillingly alive and attuned to the way that all politics is personal.... One of the year's very best TV programs.

The storytelling itself is agile, even with frequent digressions into the finer points of sociophysical architecture and the pitfalls of "nebulous public areas."

Show Me a Hero hides its agenda in plain sight. It could stand to pick up the pace at times. But this journey to the promised land for some and tragedy for others is by and large expertly crafted and intrinsically important.

It’s brilliant. HBO’s Show Me a Hero is a subtle and deeply effective melding of art and conscience; from its writing and narrative pace to its outstanding performances (particularly that of its star, Oscar Isaac) the miniseries locates a seldom-found sweet spot between storytelling and moralism.

It isn’t always easy to watch, but it’s always compelling, and almost unfairly stocked with stellar performances.

HBO’s Show Me a Hero is the TV event of the Summer, a mini-series that plays like a great American novel or a lost Sidney Lumet movie. Over six hours, writer/creator David Simon and director Paul Haggis craft a piece dense with political machinations that somehow never loses its focus on the people who get caught up in the web of public policy decisions and the people who make them.

David Simon’s extraordinary miniseries does live up to the complete meaning of Fitzgerald’s observation. It is ultimately a tragic story, with an enormously moving emotional payoff at the end. The finale will move you, perhaps to tears.

[David Simon's] new six-part miniseries is another masterwork of storytelling that's both miniaturist and epic in scale. [14 Aug 2015, p.50]

It's essentially a six-hour lecture on zoning regulations, municipal codes, and why integration remained such a thorny issue long after the civil rights era of the '60s. But if it's a lecture, it's an engaging, emotional, and surprisingly light on its feet one.

Not only does Show Me a Hero deal with the same type of intricate institutional power struggles of city government--this time in 1987 in Yonkers, NY, where a battle over the desegregation of low-income housing is waged with newly elected mayor Nick Wasicsko (Oscar Isaac) caught in the crossfire--but it does it with the kind of nuanced, ensemble-driven, character-based stories that made The Wire one of the most acclaimed television series of all time.

Simon offers a challenging six-hour miniseries that contains social and political echoes of "The Wire" but that feels amazingly topical, too, given recent events in Ferguson, Mo.; Baltimore; and Charleston, S.C.

It’s quietly brilliant, as we have come to expect from Simon.

Beautiful, painful, almost lovingly languid but never, ever boring.

The cast here is exceptional.... There are times when the pace of Show Me A Hero becomes predictably metronomic.

A timely, nuanced look at class and race through the prism of events that transpired more than a quarter-century ago, Show Me a Hero is a sobering, spare and meticulously crafted HBO miniseries.... The performances are uniformly strong, although Isaac’s is particularly interesting as almost a primer on the psychology of politics, and how much Wasicsko’s identity is derived from his desperate thirst for validation from voters.

While it might seem that Show Me A Hero ... has a distinct "eat your vegetables" aroma to it, what becomes apparent when you settle down to watch is the unmistakable lure of being hooked by the storytelling and the first-class acting.

Engrossing.... Haggis, who directed all six hours, and Simon have walked this material before.

Well cast, solidly structured, and emotionally stirring, the show is as sincere as the Bruce Springsteen songs that make up its score, a ballad of pragmatism with a passionate heart.

For the most part, Show Me a Hero revels in small, telling moments that say as much about human nature as how the American people perceive politics and politicians.

An absorbing drama.... To the extent that Show Me a Hero is flawed, the problem lies not in Simon's dramaturgy but his journalistic instincts. Show Me a Hero is but a single snapshot of a lumbering crisis that unfolded over a period of nearly three decades, and while the show's narrative is painstakingly accurate within its timeframe, its wide implications are not.

A dramatically satisfying story that embraces the second half of the F. Scott Fitzgerald line, "Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy."

We are brought into the story when the housing case has already been battled over for years, by dozens of political and legal players who are introduced to us in rapid-fire succession. But if you stick with the show, the confusion clears, not with the help of expository chunks of dialogue, but through a lifelike repetition of names, issues, and stakes.

At times, the pace drags. Some scenes make the same points over and over again. Sticking with it may feel like eating your spinach. But the commitment is worth it.

The opposition is less well-drawn.... But the plot advances, slowly and inexorably as the gears of bureaucracy, and Hero‘s emotional power builds as it focuses on the townhouses’ new residents and the initiative’s power to change their lives.

Engrossing six-hour docudrama.... Nick's decline, grounded in a somber, unflashy realism by director Paul Haggis plays out within a parable of race and class schisms, wit serialized subplots humanizing the disadvantaged citizens from the projects. [10-23 Aug 2015, p.12]

The best parts of Show Me a Hero are the sharply drawn mini-portraits of people who will ultimately move into the new public housing. Spread throughout the first five hours, you hope you will find a hero there, but in vain. They're just normal people looking for a better life, and ultimately find one.

These rather didactic scenes [of meetings] contrast with more relatable ones that detail the lives of Yonkers’ disenfranchised minority citizens, whom you know will clash with their white counterparts. Isaac receives excellent support from a large cast.

Show Me a Hero spends too little time with these characters [African-American residents of existing Yonkers housing projects] in early episodes for them to make as big an impact as the drama surrounding the white politicos arguing about their future.

Ultimately, it’s a show to be admired, not loved. Part of this may have to do with packing a complicated story with about a dozen major characters into six hours.

A remarkably intelligent if sometimes flat six-part mini-series, Show Me a Hero concerns the housing desegregation scandal that engulfed Yonkers, N.Y., in the 1980s.

When it focuses on the tragedy of Nick Wasicsko, Hero is fascinating, with Simon and co-writer William F. Zorzi tying together the personal and the political in an intelligent and often heartbreaking way. But the series is less successful when it comes to the various supporting characters.