City So Real

Master documentary filmmaker Steve James and his crew have crafted a documentary film series that captures the sheer complexities, joys, and frustrations of inner-city Chicago at the end of the 2010-2019 decade. Although the city's 2019 mayoral race is the main narrative thread of this 4-part documentary series. City So Real comprehensively explores the several social and economic issues facing modern Chicago ranging from police accountability, racism, gentrification/urban displacement, and the grim nature of public corruption in urban political systems. Steve James also masterfully captures with beautifully composed photography the unique cultures and diversity that compose the city's several neighborhoods. Another great technical achievement in the series is the editing performed by David E. Simpson and Steve James which makes you feel naturally immersed and directly involved (almost weightless and true to life) in the various characters and city settings that compose the film. After seeing this series you might not have much optimism for sincere change in our electoral or political systems but you will likely want to go out and explore your local city and uncover all of it's hidden gems and experience it's unique cultural institutions. Overall, a film series that should be rightfully cherished among the great realist impressionistic/mosaic portraits of urban life and the most compelling non-fiction works. 10/10. According, to a recent article Steve James and his crew returned to the streets of Chicago to capture the city's pressing social developments in the age of Covid-19. One could only hope for an epilogue or another episode of City So Real.

The lack of narration hurt this series. If there were only two or three mayoral candidates, that wouldn't have been an issue, but this political race was bloated and confusing. You can't just string some unnarrated clips together and hope a coherent story comes out of it. Viewers were left to guess the frontrunners, the wildcards, and the timing of everything. The series dug too deep into individual stories and rarely zoomed out to provide clear perspective.

A politically biased, window dressed perspective of a city which has parts that could be included in the next Mad Max movie - lawlessness, and defunded police have given criminals a great foothold in Chicago!

I'm waiting for some genuine commentary of the record shootings, murder, and citizen despair...

I'd like to start by saying that I don't think this was a "bad" series at all. However, the critical consensus, particularly on Metacritic was so overwhelmingly high, that I was led to believe that not only would this be one of the best series to see in 2020, but it would also be one of the best things on TV in the last few years. It is not even remotely one of the greatest series to come out of 2020, much less previous years. We are still in the "Peak TV" era, and I have the "1st World" problem of trying to keep up with everything out there. Because the critical consensus was so high, and because the series was binge released on the Nat Geo Channel, "City So Real" jumped my queue, and I stopped watching everything else just so that I could get to it. What a disappointment. After I saw the first episode, I thought it just had to get better, based on everything I had read. It didn't get better in the second episode, or any of the other ones, although I will say the final episode, which jumped a year ahead to show how Covid and George Floyd was affecting Chicago was the most interesting of the five episodes. Still, this series was very dry to watch. If you're from Chicago, it's probably incredible. If you're not from Chicago, I was led to believe it would still be great. It wasn't. Don't go out of your way to watch this. You'll thank me later.