Nick Wasicsko was a councillor in the city of Yonkers, New York, when he went for the allure that power wields and became mayor. This was at a time when the council was being told that it had to build low income housing and 'affordable' homes. The problem was that these had to go in the nice part of town where all the white voters loved. And if you want to be re-elected then you do what the voters want.Now this sounds like the usual tale of haves and have nots but it is more than that. The series follows the lives of some of the 'would be' new tenants and the people objecting and all the lovely Machiavellian politicians and their scheming ways. It is a warts and all kind of approach and at times you find it hard to single out the god guys and indeed the gals.It is very well made as you would expect from HBO but it does take its time to get going and find its stride, but at 6 episodes long it does have the time to do that. All acted really well with good period detail and a kind of inevitability about it that made me keep coming back for more. A social drama with a heart but it kind of wears it on different sleeves and is all the better for it.

It's well acted. It's honest (worthy perhaps is a better word). It's also very literal, not much in the way of drama, the pace is (understandably) slow and steady, local politics mixed with soap opera. The motivation of the characters isn't really made clear and they aren't really developed very much. I didn't feel like I got to know anybody by the end of the series. I'm sure it's true to the book etc, but as I said it's literal, a bit clunky, somewhat dull. There are important wider issues illustrated here of course, and I was generally glad I watched it. The IMDb minimum of ten lines makes for an extraordinarily long review in my opinion. I think they should reduce it to - say -7 or possibly 8 - lines at some point in the near future.

I'm just about all the way through this terrific six-episode mini-series off HBO GO, and this is television at it's finest! "Show Me a Hero" is based on the 1999 nonfiction book of the same name by former New York Times writer, Lisa Belkin. The book detailed a white middle-class neighborhood's resistance to a federally-mandated scattered-site public housing development in Yonkers, New York circa late '80s/early '90s, and how these tensions affected the city as a whole. The show is fueled by the performance of Oscar Isaac as Nick Wasicsko, a former police officer, then Yonkers City Council member running for election to be mayor of Yonkers- eventually the youngest big-city mayor (1987–89) in the nation. This series really shows how that radical loud minority can sometimes rally political and public attention to negative stereotypes and misinformation- all based on unrealistic fears. Hmmm....sounds like what's kinda going on now with this whole "war on terror", ISIS, Iran, the Middle East, etc..???Isaac's performance as Wasicsko is the heart of the project, but also look for some really good performances from veterans Peter Riegert, James Belushi, Catherine Keener, Alfred Molina, Wynona Ryder, Bob Balaban, "The Walking Dead"'s Jon Bernthal, etc... Also, for Springsteen fans like myself, a total of TWELVE of his tracks (especially the earlier ones) were used in this to represent Wasicsko's mind set!

I'm a HUGE David Simon fan. Will read anything he's written (yes, I read the Corner, all 800-some-odd pages of it), and watch anything he produces. Homicide, The Wire, you-name-it. But I feel that he completely lost the plot here, no pun intended. The overall theme seems to be "integration and giving poor people houses in middle-class residential neighborhoods that don't want them is GOOD." I wondered, half-way through this (still determined to watch it in its entirety, because, hey, David Simon, right?) if Obama had picked up the phone and called HBO, saying, "hey, couldja find a book to convert into a series about forced low-income housing, and how great it all worked out, because I'm getting ready to jam that issue nationwide down the throats of other residents," rather than anyone in their right mind thinking that this was worthwhile *as entertainment.* ****SPOILERS START BELOW*****Was it worthwhile as, perhaps, a documentary? Sure--in about 1/6th of the time. Watching it for SIX HOURS simply to watch a real-life character disintegrate? And that's the "hero" of the show? Uh...???? The mayor--the guy who gets nominated for the JFK Profile In Courage award, self-destructs and eventually suicides. There's really no correlation, unless you want to assume that the only reason this guy didn't have a meteoric rise is because the evil councilmen hosed him on the housing issue.Which, mind you, he didn't actually CHAMPION. He just elected (yes, intentional pun) NOT to fight it because a) the City of Yonkers would go bankrupt if he didn't, and b), I think from the subtext that he didn't want to be sued, personally, if he didn't support it. He was elected, in fact, not because he CHAMPIONED the housing--but because he campaigned AGAINST it. So...sorry, where's the heroism here? If anything, the council people that fought it, even if utterly in the wrong, were more heroic because they stuck to their guns. They didn't switch horses in midstream, just because it was politically expedient. The entire award nomination was utter Political Correctness.Which--if you're watching with an educated and critical eye--is sort of the theme of the entire show. Political correctness run amok. Yes, a perfectly normal middle-class neighborhood is torn apart, in order to forcibly slam low-income housing right in the middle of it, in townhome groupings in something like 28 locations. The neighbors--even without being remotely bigoted (not to say that they weren't, but as a property owner) are vehemently opposed, as it will affect their property values.Throughout, the predominantly or all-white residents are effectively all portrayed as EVIL, except for the ONE resident who "sees the light" and decides to welcome the newcomers. Not one of the existing residents is shown as a perfectly normal person who would, quite naturally, have misgivings about what low-income housing, across the street from them, will do to their own property values. Nope--they were all stereotypical ranting bigots. {sigh} ALL the residents are low-income women of color with no man in the house, and with multiple children. (Stereotypes much?). Again, sure, it's story-telling, and by definition, has to be condensed and compressed, but--no pun intended-there are no shades of grey here. All the low-income residents are good; all the opponents are BAD. Only the mayor who changes his stance--not by choice, mind you--is "good." The performances are great. No doubt. But none--NONE--of the characters are particularly likable. The mayor is not. The council people basically all suck. The poor families have the only really likable characters. Again...stereotyping.It's just...it's a 60 minute tale, at MOST, bloated and inflated out to six hours. There aren't any heroes here, ironically. Rather than an enjoyable story that carries a moral lesson, it's a moral lesson and political and sociological stance forcibly rammed down your viewing throat, disguised as a story. And that disguise isn't very good.If you waste your time, don't say you weren't warned.