Show Me a Hero Review

The subject could not sound less like television: a federal judge's desegregation order, a city council that refuses to comply, fines that nearly bankrupt Yonkers, and a fight over 200 units of scattered-site public housing. Simon and Zorzi, former colleagues at The Baltimore Sun, make it riveting by staging council votes like gunfights and by never letting anyone in the story become a cartoon.

Oscar Isaac, who won a Golden Globe, plays Nick Wasicsko, a former police officer elected the country's youngest big-city mayor by opposing the housing and then forced by the courts to build it, and he is compulsively watchable even in long scenes of procedure. Catherine Keener is superb as an East Yonkers homeowner whose fear slowly gives way, Alfred Molina is a blustering opponent, Winona Ryder a council ally, and the residents of the projects, among them LaTanya Richardson Jackson's home health aide, get equal weight.

Paul Haggis directs all six hours plainly, Bruce Springsteen songs follow Nick through the story, and Andrij Parekh shoots period Yonkers without nostalgia. The title is from Fitzgerald, show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy, and it signals where the story goes. It is slow in places, as some critics complained, but few series have made housing policy this human.