Mafia dramas are very common things, but Gomorra, inspired by Roberto Saviano's expose of the Neapolitan Camorra, is very good indeed, although beautiful Naples has surely never been filmed so uglily. It resembles 'The Godfather' more than it does 'The Sopranos', with its broad-arc, (soap)-operatic tone, as it tells the tale of the fall of the all-powerful Savastono clan. It's horrific, and one strength is the way its most sympathetic characters are shown to commit acts of utterly unjustifiable evil; and yet one is drawn along in a grand story arc nonetheless. The closest point of comparison is perhaps 'The Wire'; in comparison, 'Gomorra' is more poetic, less didactic, but also less multi-layered, focusing solely on the criminals and only in passing on other elements of civil society. We're two series in now, and one has to wonder if the quality will be maintained; at this point, the story lines that have driven the plot so far appear to have reached their natural ends. But to date, this has been television of the highest order.
Review of Gomorrah
