Perfectly grim, and gripping

My favourite epithet about my favourite TV series was the headline in a review by the Irish Times: ‘Gomorrah. Where characters die before they become characters.’

The review appeared to suggest that this was a bad thing. But I disagree. What made Game of Thrones so original and compelling, especially in the early seasons, was its refreshing willingness to break convention by murdering key players at the drop of a hat. Gomorrah (Sky Atlantic) merely pushes that troubling edginess a step further: whether you’re the head of the Neapolitan mob, an adorable, cute child, or just some random, decent civilian briefly introduced in vignette, there is never a guarantee that you’ll survive the episode. So, just like in the brutal, amoral mob universe of the Camorra it depicts, you the viewer can never feel comfortable or safe.

Some of the killings — often preceded by torture — are so heartbreaking you half-wonder how decency could possibly allow such horror as TV entertainment. There’s one in particular that will haunt me forever where a pretty, totally innocent girl is beaten within an inch of her life by a character who, up till then, you’d considered sympathetic. No one is punished. It’s just another of those senseless things that happens in this very religious but godless universe.

And that’s the point. The reason that Gomorrah is one of the best series ever shown on TV is its uncompromising fidelity to the truth. Sure, its mob drama predecessors — The Godfather trilogy, Goodfellas, The Sopranos, et al — haven’t exactly shied away from depicting hair-trigger ultra-violence. But there’s nothing in any of them to match the amorality, the unrelenting bleakness or, quite, the echtness of Gomorrah.

Now in its fourth season, the series is a fictionalised version of a tell-all true-life bestseller by Roberto Saviano, a local journalist who now lives under police protection in the US because of threats from one of the Camorra cartels.