David Simon’s new series Show Me a Hero provides everything you might expect from a TV-maker with The Wire, Homicide: Life on the Street and Treme on his résumé.
This adaptation of Lisa Belkin’s non-fiction book about Nick Wasicsko – a former cop who, in 1987, unexpectedly became mayor of Yonkers after running as a populist outsider – has, in the established Simon style, dialogue so real that it feels as if it was peeled off the street, and period images so richly composed that they could be auctioned at Sotheby’s. (It’s a sign of the high production values that the director is Oscar-winning Hollywood auteur Paul Haggis.)
Another Simon strength on display is his sense of the shape that best fits a particular tale. While The Wire was an epic five-decker novel of a show, meticulously exploring every inch of one city, Show Me a Hero is a rare American example of the six-part drama format that has traditionally been the province of the British. Even within this sprint length, it moves at Bolt-like speed: lesser TV-makers would have spent a lot longer following Wasicsko’s campaign, but Simon has him in office by the end of the opening episode.
It’s the right decision, because Show Me a Hero really begins where the movie The Candidate ends, with the newly-elected politician asking: “What do we do now?” Spectacularly, even by the standards of democratic back-flips, Wasicsko had abandoned the main plank of his campaign – opposition to a desegregated public housing project – even before the votes were counted. By the second episode, he has come to be seen by the electorate as a continuation of the problem rather than the solution.
And it is this element that provides the unanticipated element of the show: its spooky political topicality. After establishing his place in TV history with series set in the recent past – Homicide, The Wire and Treme – Simon seemed to have retreated into history for the first time.
However, Show Me a Hero has reached the screen at a time when maverick insurgent candidacies – in which voters turn to someone who is apparently an anti-politician in the hope that they will sort out politics – are erupting in America (Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders) and Greece (Alexis Tsipras), while British viewers will inevitably think of Jeremy Corbyn. Tsipras, who has gone from hero to has-been at Olympic speed, seems especially reminiscent of Wasicsko.
These contemporary resonances are especially impressive and unexpected because the already old story in Show Me a Hero became even older during the show’s long progress to the screen. Belkin’s source book came out in 1999, and it was early in the new millennium that Simon first discussed a possible collaboration on it with William F Zorzi, a former journalistic colleague. Yet, frustrating though the delays may have been, Show Me a Hero has found, in August 2015, its perfect time.
This is not entirely due to prescience. Simon, and the HBO network, could reasonably have seen in the Wasicsko material a parallel with the Obama administration, in which a triumphal outsider has struggled with the realities of being in power, and the racial tensions on which the Yonkers story turned are another predictable resonance.
The broader relevance to Trump, Sanders, Tsipras and Corbyn can be regarded as a lucky bonus, but I think it’s more than that. Throughout broadcasting history, certain shows have turned out to be in exactly the right place at the right time.
The populist Tory economics of the 1980s were uncannily foreshadowed by two dodgy TV geezers – Del Boy Trotter in Only Fools and Horses and Arthur Daley in Minder – in series that coincided with the beginning of the Thatcher administration. In 1990, the original BBC version of House of Cards, a story of Tory political regicide, began transmission in the week that Margaret Thatcher was forced out of Number 10. Downton Abbey, starting in the 2010 summer when the toff-stuffed government of David Cameron took power, so perfectly reflected the new class dynamics at Westminster that the series became Private Eye’s satirical metaphor for the coalition.
But, though these fact-fiction overlaps contain some luck, they also come from judgement. Just as the novels of HG Wells anticipated aspects of warfare and space travel, good writers are often able to detect future moods and moves. And that is what David Simon, always acutely attuned to politics, has done again with Show Me a Hero.
