There is nothing worse than when something made to look serious turns out to look like comedy. That is the case with this episode. I didn't know whether to laugh or cringe out of collective embarrassment that we humans are prone to. The episode is written by someone who has never been to New York, or maybe has been here in the 1970s. In one shot, we're shown a building near Brighton Beach, and told that "even locals don't go there, it belongs to Bulgarian drug dealers" or something along these lines. That building is actually home to $700,000-$900,000 apartments in reality. But it gets better, inside we see people making or using drugs on the stairs, holes in the walls, guys walking around with guns, etc. I don't know if people that have never been to NYC in their lives think that this is a plausible representation of any neighborhood of our city, but it's not. Even the worst buildings in the Bronx are not like that, let alone Brighton Beach, which has gotten quite affluent in the last two decades.
Brighton Beach isn't beautiful, because it's boring, not because it's dangerous. There is no mafia; no Italian, no Russian, no mafia of any kind like the one pictured in this episode. And what would an Italian mobster be doing in a cheap Russian supermarket as shown in the beginning of the show?
It's sad that people from the outside watch these kind of episodes about New York and think that this is even remotely a realistic portrayal of the city. This isn't the 1979 anymore and there are no buildings or streets where "even the locals don't go" - that's just ridiculous. If you're going to write a script for a show that's going to be on TV, why not at least leave your Hollywood villa and visit the city you're writing about?
