Show Me a Hero

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Adebisi

Adebisi

Clump of Cells
<Silver Donator>
27,746
32,851
Still great. Two more episodes left.

David Simon should write all the television shows.
 
khorum

khorum

Murder Apologist
24,338
81,363
That's actually a problem tbh. HBO doesn't have anything interesting on the roster until GoT comes back.
 
Szlia

Szlia

Member
6,634
1,376
If I have a single complaint to formulate is that the number of unwanted pregnancies from deadbeat fathers is more than a little hard to swallow, even with the touching letter from the hard working latino mother. Also Spallone is a bit of a caricature, but it could very well be true to life!

But other than that, it's very good. I especially like the contrasts between the interactions in public with crowds and those in private, the two strongest examples being when Keener's character calls the mayor and when the black lady comes and shakes her hand in the car.
 
Bondurant

Bondurant

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
3,851
4,795
This show is great : solid writing and good to very good actors. As an advice, Show Me A Hero is about real people, don't check wikipedia unless you don't care about spoilers. I hope this 6 part miniseries puts Simon on some big tv show project again.
 
D

Div

Silver Knight of the Realm
325
61
I thought the first 4 episodes were great and interesting. The last 2 I thought were a bit slow but I guess most of the drama at that point was gone and it was just finishing out the story.
 
Gilgamel

Gilgamel

A Man Chooses....
2,869
52
This is sitting on my DVR but I refuse to watch it til I can plow through it all at once. DO want.
 
Mist

Mist

REEEEeyore
<Gold Donor>
31,517
24,011
Szlia_sl said:
If I have a single complaint to formulate is that the number of unwanted pregnancies from deadbeat fathers is more than a little hard to swallow, even with the touching letter from the hard working latino mother. Also Spallone is a bit of a caricature, but it could very well be true to life!

But other than that, it's very good. I especially like the contrasts between the interactions in public with crowds and those in private, the two strongest examples being when Keener's character calls the mayor and when the black lady comes and shakes her hand in the car.
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I lived in a public housing complex from age 1-8, during basically the entire 80s, as a child of a single mother with a father that wanted nothing to do with me, and whom I've never actually met despite the fact that he lives like 25 minutes from me.

Nearly all the other people in the public housing were also single mothers with dependent children.

This series was especially moving for me personally and I cried about a dozen times.
 
Khalan

Khalan

Trakanon Raider
1,468
1,393
Just finished this. Great series. Fucking depressing. Almost teared up a few times.
 
Khane

Khane

Got something right about marriage
20,611
14,353
How many episodes of this are there per "season"?
 
Soygen

Soygen

The Dirty Dozen For the Price of One
<Nazi Janitors>
28,524
45,036
I'm through episode 4 and really enjoying this. David Simon is quality, fo sho.
 
Blitz

Blitz

<Bronze Donator>
5,983
6,656
Curiosity killed the cat. Made the mistake of reading about the book... Don't do it.

Simon's the shit, btw.
 
khorum

khorum

Murder Apologist
24,338
81,363
Did the book mention how Oscar Newman's architectural determinism has been somewhat discredited in recent years? In fact, the notion thatenvironmental factors alone(like public spaces and common stairwells) led to higher crimes and juvenile misbehavior probably set us back a few years.

Next City_sl said:
The most famous denunciation of high-rises as criminal hotspots came from Oscar Newman's 1973 architecture book Defensible Space - an in-depth analysis of crime in the New York City Housing Authority's (NYCHA) complexes. "It is the apartment tower itself which is the real and final villain," Newman concludes.

But even though they were often poorly integrated into their surrounding neighborhoods, these apartment towers were not inevitably plagued by trouble because of design alone...But the fate of the high-rises was largely predicated on local context, not architecture. Joseph Heathcott points out in the first Public Housing Myths essay, "Violent crime rates were no higher - and were often lower - in Pruitt-Igoe than in many of the low-rise neighborhoods on the West Side"
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I loved the show but that bit where they said Newman's ideas were in use today is a bit off. In Chicago I worked in the campaign to replace the Robert Taylor homes and Cabrini Green with a hybrid privatized housing voucher system instead of the pure public housing blocks that Yonkers did. Sure enough the families who took the vouchers and just moved into apartments all over the city and suburbs are showing much better outcomes than the folks who just moved into redesigned public housing blocks like Newman/Yonkers did.
 
Adebisi

Adebisi

Clump of Cells
<Silver Donator>
27,746
32,851
Robert Taylor homes were fuuuuuucked.

I recommend everyone read Gang Leader for a Day by Sudhir Venkatesh, if you want to better understand how these low income properties are run by the housing authority, police, building administrators, and drug dealers.
 
khorum

khorum

Murder Apologist
24,338
81,363
Robert Taylor homes gets mentioned a few times for that since it didn't start out terrible when the adult-to-children ratio wasn't too crazy. But then it was.

True story: Massachussetts governor Deval Patrick grew up in Robert Taylor Homes and that's partly why he went balls out for housing reform.
 
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