Gomorrah: Down in Ol’ Napoli That’s Amore

Question: Why is the best television about crime? The Wire, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad. Theory: They work the contrast between the viewer in the comfort of their homes while allowing them to immerse themselves without risk in the desperation of the underworld. How thrilling and validating to watch the consequences of bad decisions, somewhat open to us, play out - the lieutenant on the brink of betraying the boss, the store owner scrambling to pay back local thugs. Watching these through a little window in the corner of our living room, while we enjoy the security of our safe decisions. No such contrast is possible with romance - too ideal, war - too large for the screen, comedy - not serious enough. Only crime lets us peer through an inverted periscope into the underworld.

This week I finished Gomorrah which is one of those shows that snaps into meaning only once the final piece few pieces have been laid down. Running at five seasons the show does at times stray from its central precept - the relationship between Ciro Di Mazo and Gennaro “Genny” Savastano. Genny is the son of the crime lord Pietro, while Ciro is Pierto’s right hand man, in the beginning at least.

What divides good from mediocre television is the main character’s evolution (or devolution). In the beginning Pietro is not sure that his son has the nerve, the will or the intelligence to inherit the family business. Actor Salvatore Esposito plays Genny well. In the beginning he is a grinning dunce, prone to tantrums and well insulated from the grim realities of the family business.

And grim it is. I have never watched a show so willing to dispatch characters it has spent seasons deepening. Almost anyone is due for the chop. That’s certainly a way to keep your actors in line.

The landscape is far from the endless seaside, the fishing villages, the pizza and amoré of the Hollywood imagination. Napoli is grimy, it’s dirty. The landscape is littered with modernist tower blocks in various states of decay. The buildings like their inhabitants and the modernist fantasy of reformation have been abandoned by wider society left to rot and exploit one another.

In some crime dramas the mafia organisations seem to be a mirror of external corporate entities - their hierarchies, their obsession with profit - a comment, now exhausted, that money corrupts. Gomorrah skips over such cheap didacticism. Money does not represent an escape from the squalor to those who have it. The immense gym bags full of euros are transient, emblematic and provide no relief. Instead, Gomorrah is about the dynamics of pure power.

Because of this ancient theme, the plot revolves around how power manifests and is overthrown. There can be no peace, betrayal always means a grisly death for either the betrayer or the betrayed. Unquestioning loyalty and backing the ride side is the only protection against a quick death for the lieutenants. Through this lens - Ciro and Genny’s relationship can switch from the deepest loyalty to the most ruthless vendetta - yet there is something that builds over time that fits just as easily into either mode - is it love, is it respect or is it just they are inextricably linked with no history longer than that which they share? Does the disposability of human life sharpen the meaning of those that survive?

At times it becomes tough to bear. All of the characters do terrible things and many of these acts are unnecessarily evil. We love and become attached to the main characters in spite of this. Gomorrah refuses sentimentality because it is not American and does not feel the need to coddle its audience. Yet it also refuses nihilism of the former Soviet bloc - things still have meaning - loyalty, history, family, blood are the only real bullion.

What of Gomorrah’s moral stances of greater society, of authority, of the poor? Curiously it has little to say about any of these. The police play a marginal role, their authority ending at the edge of the slums, yet throughout the series we join the characters in other European cities - where they hob knob then murder members of other syndicates - sometimes other Italians but often the Russian mob. The implication is that civilisation ends but crime never does - it is in the underworld but it is also ubiquitous.

The true test of great television is after you have finished the last episode, turned off the set and experienced the emptiness of that fully-fledged world suddenly shift from the now into the archive of memory. It leaves a space. I had that with The Wire and Breaking Bad and I felt the same thing with Gomorrah. I’m resisting the urge, for now, to visit Napoli. Having travelled through Italy many times with friends and their relatives, I have only passed Napoli once, with Vesuvius towering in the background I had one flash of Gomorrah before it was replaced by the mucky beaches peeling by as the train rushed on.