A docudrama series chronicling some of America's most notorious mobsters, each season dealing with a different city/region.
CreatorsStephen David, Tim W. Kelly
The Education of Lucky Luciano
Jun 15, 2015
Charles "Lucky" Luciano arrives in New York, teaming with Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel. During Prohibition, Luciano's crew makes a fortune.
Equal Opportunity Gangster
Jun 22, 2015
"Lucky" Luciano gains power in the New York underworld during Prohibition. When two bosses start a mob war, Luciano plans to kill them both.
King of New York
Jun 29, 2015
"Lucky" Luciano takes over the New York mob, organizing the Five Families. As Luciano's power grows, so does the attention from the Feds.
A Rising Threat
Jul 6, 2015
Luciano's decision to enter the prostitution business gives Thomas Dewey the chance to arrest him and put him on trial.
Exit Strategy
Jul 13, 2015
Luciano is found guilty of running a prostitution ring and goes to prison, leaving Vito Genovese as acting boss.
The Mob at War
Jul 20, 2015
World War II begins, and the military asks Luciano to aid in the invasion of Sicily. Thomas Dewey considers letting him go.
New Frontiers
Jul 27, 2015
Luciano takes over Vito Genovese's heroin ring in Italy, then rejoins Meyer Lansky at a mob summit in Cuba. Genovese and Carlo Gambino plot against the mob leadership, and Bugsy Siegel's dream of Las Vegas turns deadly.
End Game
Aug 3, 2015
Vito Genovese and Carlo Gambino make their move. The police raid a mob summit, arresting Genovese. Gambino takes over.
GenerationofSwine
@GenerationofSwine
I guess the key word here is "Docudrama" and for a Docudrama, it honestly moves a bit too fast. Actually, for the amount of information it conveys, it moves a lot too fast and feels a bit crammed. It would have been nice, and probably a lot more expensive, if they dragged it out a little longer so that they could pay attention to some of the finer details. Instead, a lot of the little things come at you with all the force and speed of a shotgun blast. It doesn't really give you time to linger on it and contemplate it. Usually the nice thing about docudramas is that there is enough filler and useless details to let you dwell on the important ones for at least a couple of seconds. However, despite that, the information is there. Ray Liotta is a great narrator, the cast of interviews are the regular faces that you've grown accustomed to seeing in documentaries about the mob, particularly Rabb (who is in every mob documentary ever made), with a couple of distant relatives and decedents of the people portrayed along with additional actors known for gangster rolls to fill out the interviews nicely. It's not a matter of too much information and it's not a matter of too little. What gets me about this is the pacing and the order of the information it presents. When a big, profound, and stunning item is dropped on the audience, good documentaries give them time to digest it with either reenactments that the audience can not pay attention to or little unimportant facts that most viewers don't care about. Instead it too often drops one blow after another and relies on repetition too much rather than digestion. And, as where that works well in movies to keep the viewer on the edge of their seat, it doesn't in documentaries that tend to attract an audience that wants to brings an entirely different kind of fascination to what they are watching. The wow factor shouldn't be in the action in a series like this, it should come with giving the mind a moment to take in that "whoa, they actually did that" moment.
