I stumbled upon this limited series documentary while researching the murders of four men on which little is known. When I learned that the supreme team was tried in the brutal murders of Fernando Suarez and Pablo Perlaza, and two additional men I was interested in this documentary to learn more about this notorious gang I admittedly knew nothing about.
After watching nearly three hours about the subject I learned even less about Supreme Team than was on their Wikipedia.
This rambling, narcissistic, gangster-glorification was a major let down, concerned more about making them look cool and putting in as many montages as possible.
First, we start by crowbarring the biggest name they got, LL Cool J into the beginning simply because he grew up in the same neighborhood and once went to a party with the gang.
The two gang leaders, Kenneth "Supreme" McGriff and Gerald "Prince" Miller provide interviews basically amounting to tiny sound bites while they get their nicknames pasted on screen with their nice little graphic to look 'cool'. Then whenever they say something meant to be profound it comes up as a huge text across the screen. Let's also try to forget the part where they used that photo app to animate a still photo of the two making them smile at the camera (cringe).
As for the story, they definitely got a large amount of people that they could to talk about the gang, but it feels as though there was no planning before interviews took place, and we just jump from point to point without much of any idea where the history leading between each is. Sometimes it's just a man on the street reacting to information we've just heard.
It took until about halfway into episode two where it totally lost me. We get to the arrest of Prince and focus solely on how awful it was for him and his wife to have their home raided and police put her mink coats in the bathtub (they even filmed reenactment footage haha), while literally not even mentioning the names of the "four murders" he was wanted for. That's it. That's all the coverage it gets. Their drug dealing is only mentioned in passing after ep 1. Instead we hear about how Prince was a nice guy for pleading for police to let his wife put on pants, or how hard it is to hear "found guilty" in court.
Any doubt that this doesn't have an agenda to glorify this brutal gang that dealt drugs and murdered, ep three prominently features a man wearing a sweatshirt with Supreme's face and name on it proudly talking about how he wouldn't snitch on his friends and was given 20 years for such. Then their friends crying they are in prison. Almost all of the criminal aspects of this gang are brushed largely ignored because it would put them in a bad light.
The murders I mentioned? The Supreme Team gang members robbed two men before putting bags over their heads and beating them to death with a baseball bat, dumping their bodies across queens the same time two other exactly similar murders happened in the same area. But no, let's instead focus on how the leaders of this very gang were cool guys with aspirations and have "served enough time".
If you are familiar with the supreme team and hip hop history, you'll probably like hearing some more tidbits and seeing a flashy presentation. If you're watching this looking to learn anything about these men's crimes they were tried and convicted for, you won't.
