Impossibly exciting: Sky Atlantic’s ZeroZeroZero reviewed

ZeroZeroZero is the impossibly exciting new drugs series from Roberto Saviano — the author who gave us perhaps my all-time favourite TV drama Gomorrah. What I love about Gomorrah is its utter ruthlessness and total artistic integrity. It’s set amid the warring drugs factions of the Neopolitan mafia (the Camorra) and never at any point do you feel that authenticity is being sacrificed for reasons of marketability or politically correct sensitivities or narrative arc. Not without reason has it been called the series ‘where characters die before they become characters’.

Saviano himself has paid a terrible price for his honesty. He grew up among those Neapolitan gangs — ‘I saw my first corpse in my first year of secondary school’ — and has described their world with such fidelity that he is now a marked man. ‘This life is shit — it’s hard to describe how bad it is,’ he has said of his miserable peripatetic existence, now mainly in the US, with bodyguards, continually shifting travel arrangements and windowless rooms.