‘Show Me A Hero’: Turning Public Housing Into TV Gold
You wouldn’t think a show about the politics of state housing in an area of 1980s New York would make great viewing, right? Luckily David Simon, who you and I know as the creator of The Wire, knows better than we do. Because ‘Show Me A Hero’ is pretty much incredible.
The premise is this: Young politician Nick Wasicsko runs an unlikely mayoral campaign in Yonkers, New York and shockingly defeats a six-time incumbent, largely due to his opposition to a court-ruled state housing plan. But his promised appeal is rejected and, seeing the writing on the wall, Wasicsko is forced to go ahead with the plans or else risk bankrupting the city. This because the city has been found to have consciously segregated previous public housing developments from more affluent neighbourhoods, instead huddling them all together in poorer places. So, by judge’s order, Yonkers has been ordered to spread the new state houses throughout the map. This causes massive civil unrest as the middle class rallies in force against having poorer folk move in down the street, thus damaging their property values and bringing crime into their neighbourhoods. So they say, at least. Wasicsko quickly loses all support from the white middle-class camp that got him elected and the institutional pressure-pot simmers to a boil. All based on a true story.
It’s very specific to its time and political place, which somehow doesn’t turn it into obscurity. Credit the sheer, overwhelming humanity of it all. Never have community politics seemed so full of emotion. Wasicsko (played with absolute brilliance by Oscar Isaac) is the main character and his plight is the central focus. But the heart of the show is in the minor characters. Those living day to day in their state-built dwellings. There’s the young mother trying to raise her asthmatic child through the bitter twists of fate. The Dominican mother trying to support her three children on the paltry wages of her sweat and labour. The rebellious teen stuck between childhood petulance and the permanence of adulthood decision. Ah, and the most poignant of them all, the 47 year old woman blinded by her diabetes, struggling to adapt to her new limitations as her stoic (adult) son and daughter try do what’s best for her. She’s played with an enduring pride and pragmatism by LaTanya Richardson.
Add in a slew of self-serving politicians and a few middle-class picketers and the vision is complete.
As with most David Simon things, you really do need to lean in or you’ll miss something. Minor details can have major implications. And since this one is based on a true story, the usual internet search isn’t the best option. I mean, as everyone knows, you can’t usually say you’ve watched a show until you’ve imdb-ed all the cool people in it and google image searched the attractive ones, but in this case: Be careful. Resist the temptation to fall too deeply into the wiki-wormhole because there are real life facts that are best not spoiled too soon. The plot moves fast, you have to give it the attention it deserves.
Just as in The Wire, SMAH relies a lot on unknown actors. People with no audience baggage, they may as well have been plucked from the real lives they portray, but that’s a testament to how well these characters are all inhabited. Put simply, bad acting is not something to worry about here. The people are written to be believable and nothing in the various performances betray that. It’s a rare televisual experience where (again, just like The Wire) you can lose yourself so completely in its world that it feels more real than real does.
Like Oscar Isaac. He’s an actor that I’ve had big raps on from his efforts in Inside Llewyn Davis and A Most Violent Year, one of those Next Big Thing folks. He’s on the precipice of becoming the Al Pacino of his generation. No small praise. And yet I lost him so completely in this show that it came as a shock when, midway through Part Four, I reconnected Isaac with the role he was playing. I saw the actor within the part and it rocked me. That’s how much of a revelation this dude is in this.
Probably because of the racial tensions that dwell beneath the surface, SMAH feels strangely relevant for a show that begins nearly twenty years in the past. The title comes from an F. Scott Fitzgerald quote: “Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy”. A tragedy this most certainly is, for many and in many ways. Even early on that’s the case. The public housing debate begins as a touchstone but very quickly emerges into a cause for riotous council meetings where mayors have to shout into the microphone just to be heard. The tragedy is in how pointless it all is. There’s no wiggle room between pandering to the mindless constituents and walking the line of the law, and there are no more mindless constituents than those in an angry mob. There’s no reasoning with an angry mob, they’re all there to reinforce each other’s misguided opinions.
You get the feeling that if this happened today, someone would drop the ‘R’ word and all of the opposition would disappear in a frightened horde of ashamedness. Nobody wants to think of themselves as racist, not even racists. But there’s a tendency these days to use that word loosely and accusatorily which is dangerous. Many of the housing adversaries probably genuinely think that it’s all about housing prices and crime. Yet as Wasicsko claims near the end of the fourth part, it’s all rooted in fear. And he played into that fear to begin with. There wasn’t any recovering from that, no matter how much he then fought for the plans.
Perhaps it would mean a drop in housing prices. How many people do you think were planning to sell, though? It’s one more example from an endless list of numbers and letters trumping human life. This show gives you the benefit of a window into actual lives and the effect that the ghetto flooding has had on them, a critical measure of perspective lacking for many within this show.
“The thing is, people just want a home, right? It’s the same for everybody” – Nick Wasicsko.
Mary Dorman (Catherine Keener) provides the human barometer of the white middle-class rioters. Her arc is sympathetically carved out, in large part thanks to the portrayal. Her steady, considered politics are the line of origin that others deviate from when the houses start going up and the protests pass the point of decency, descending from loudmouthed ignorance to unforgivable offence.
The show aired through August on HBO in the US and finished up this week in NZ on Soho (for those of you that view their telly that way). It is based on a widely-acclaimed book by New York Times writer Lisa Belkin (published in 2000) and was adapted by Simon and William F. Zorzi (a Baltimore Sun comrade of Simon’s who also wrote for The Wire and has been working on this script for 13 years as a passion project). Paul Haggis directs all six episodes with plenty of grit and a touch of flair. Bruce Springsteen’s working class anthems are scattered throughout the soundtrack.
There are so many different things I could talk about with this show, it’s so complex. But what it all comes back to is what an achievement it is for a show (technically a ‘mini-series’) that is centred around legal, civil and political bureaucracy can be so full of soul. SMAH is a more sentimental show than The Wire. It’s a tragedy, it has to be. But it’s not artificial. The pangs of emotion are earned. Every episode has moments that’ll have you teary-eyed in a way that you never could have expected. This is a show about public housing that’ll actually make you care about its central issue, make you empathise with the people it affects (the ones that are properly affected, not those that pretend to be). Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy. Write me a tragedy and I’ll bare you my heart.