Boy often likes to rebuke me for having impossibly high standards when it comes to TV. ‘Why can’t you just enjoy it?’ he says. This is disappointing. One reason I ruined myself to give him an expensive education is so I wouldn’t have to share my viewing couch with a drooling moron happy to gawp at any old crap. Worse, whenever I try to draw his attention to stuff I consider to be extra specially worth watching — Fauda, Babylon Berlin, etc. — he rejects it because it has been tainted by my recommendation.
So the next brilliant thing he won’t get to see is Gomorrah (Sky). This relentlessly dour and violent series about the Camorra mob in Naples is now filming its fourth season, but because I’ve come to it late I’m still only on the first. What I so love about it — essentially my criterion for all great art — is the ruthless, uncompromising integrity of its vision.
What do I mean by that? Well, the episode where we meet the African immigrants trying to grab a piece of the local drugs trade is a good example. Drama has become so impossibly ‘woke’ these days that few writers or directors could have resisted the opportunity to virtue-signal here by hinting at the moral superiority of the noble Nubian over the grotesquely racist white-skinned chauvinists of the Neapolitan mob.
Yep, the Camorra are shown as racist, no question. In the prison yard they mock the black inmates with monkey noises. Mob boss Pietro is so disgusted that he won’t even make a deal with them, quite clearly considering them to be a lower form of life.
But here’s where it gets interesting: the series — based on a book by Roberto Saviano so carefully researched that the author has had to live since 2006 under police protection — makes no attempt whatsoever to teach Pietro, and by extension the viewer, the error of his ways.
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