Fear City: New York vs the Mafia

Good movie!

Good movie!

Good movie!

Nothing particularly explosive or new information. Slow paced and dragged on - could have easily skipped to episode 3 without losing context or much detail. The series lacked any depth from the actual perpetrators, whilst focusing on minute boring details.

So what if it have been told before? But it's a little boring.

It was decent. Not great, not horrible. But it just struck me as though it was something that was written, produced, and directed by Giuliani and Chertoff - kind of like throwing your own birthday party or owning your own newspaper and proclaiming "I am the greatest!" I mean, great....you got some of the Wiseguy bosses in the 1980's. But anyone that keeps up with the Mob knows these families are still very much thriving with new bosses (in the shadows), with new tactics, and new ventures. So, I don't see what all their huge celebrations were about. But again...fairly entertaining.

They could have done everything in a single episode. It was too stretched and nothing new.

Repetitive due to the lack of real original content except for a few bad quality wiretaps. Really disappointing for what could have been an interesting and insightful topic

To put it bluntly fear city is boring. Fear city tries to retell the events from the police's perspective in taking down the five mafia families in New York city yet it falls flat. The show is very short and completely lacking of substance, what little content was provided was often drawn out and simply not interesting. Multiple times the show wasted 10+ minutes retelling how some big time mobster's house was bugged. That's cool and all but it really falls flat when the viewer is never introduced to the mobster other than 'he is a soldier in this family and people fear him.' I like seeing the police perspective and all but not so much to the point where the crimes of the mobsters aren't mentioned. Fear city gives you just enough to keep you watching but little enough to where you feel like nothing has happened. It makes the show feel very dumbed down and perhaps it is. I would only ever recommend this to someone who wants to solely see the police side of things with little to no specifics on how the mafia broke the law.

First episode was really interesting. As someone who read a lot about organized crime, especially in USA, I was surprised by some new details that I did not know. In the end, it was really well made. But there are several things I completely did not like. First of all, where is Bonnano crime family? All we hear the whole show is how they got "Big Five", but always mention only four. You know why? Because Bonanno was not actually in the Commission at that moment in time (read about 1963 plot and Donnie Brasko). So basically they went off easily in the end. And Bonnano were very ruthless and huge family, who got even stronger in the 90s (I believe in part because all the other families had to recover after the Commission trials). But because that would not sound so cool, that the biggest blow was on four out of five, we never hear about them. Secondly, it astonished me how they talked about John Gotti. The man was basically THE boss of New York. He was mentioned couple of times, but we also never hear directly how huge he got after killing his boss. And my biggest complaint is of course about Fat Tony Salerno. All three episodes we hear about how they got the boss of one of the most powerfull families. And he did do a lot of nasty crime, but what we NEVER hear about is that he was not actually the boss. He was just a front, a relay to the real one - Lombardo and then Gigante. If you watched Sopranos, he was basically Uncle Junior. And this could have easily be mentioned, that would show that Mafia can still elude some justice. But all we hear about how they got the boss, when actual leader was still free (while Salerno got 100 years).