"City Confidential", the name conjures up images of B crime features starring people like Preston Foster, or tabloid journals featuring sensational or sensationalized events and featuring photos of celebrities now grown old and fat.
And this program deals with unpromising materials, criminal events in towns small and large across America. Who killed whom, and why? There must be a dozen such series floating around, "The FBI Files," "Watching the Detectives," and so forth.
But, unlike the others, this series seems to have been written and produced by people who have at least graduated from elementary school.
For me, the best part is the introduction to the crime, the historical evolution of the community and its separation into distinguishable nuclei. And it's not "Community Development 101" either. The narration (by the late actor Paul Winfield) sounds insinuating and skeptical -- and it is -- but the cynicism is appropriate to the situations being described. When an interested party makes a defensive statement, the narrator comments, "Well -- maybe." The descriptive narration is understandable and apparently accurate. The media people are the most enjoyable interviewees. They have no dog in the hunt and can be cheerfully iconoclastic.
Then, after we learn how the town got to be the way it is, the rivalries and intrigues, we get into some plausible coverage of the local police and the other parties involved.
It isn't a masterpiece, of course. It's a commercial television enterprise. But I find myself actually LEARNING something from it, about living with neighbors, about power, about rage. And I'm a sociologist.
And this program deals with unpromising materials, criminal events in towns small and large across America. Who killed whom, and why? There must be a dozen such series floating around, "The FBI Files," "Watching the Detectives," and so forth.
But, unlike the others, this series seems to have been written and produced by people who have at least graduated from elementary school.
For me, the best part is the introduction to the crime, the historical evolution of the community and its separation into distinguishable nuclei. And it's not "Community Development 101" either. The narration (by the late actor Paul Winfield) sounds insinuating and skeptical -- and it is -- but the cynicism is appropriate to the situations being described. When an interested party makes a defensive statement, the narrator comments, "Well -- maybe." The descriptive narration is understandable and apparently accurate. The media people are the most enjoyable interviewees. They have no dog in the hunt and can be cheerfully iconoclastic.
Then, after we learn how the town got to be the way it is, the rivalries and intrigues, we get into some plausible coverage of the local police and the other parties involved.
It isn't a masterpiece, of course. It's a commercial television enterprise. But I find myself actually LEARNING something from it, about living with neighbors, about power, about rage. And I'm a sociologist.