After Sunday night’s premiere of HBO’s Show Me a Hero, many viewers are discovering the Yonkers housing crisis of the 1980s and ‘90s for the first time. But the miniseries, written and produced by David Simon, is based on a 1999 book by former New York Times correspondent Lisa Belkin, and it’s her reporting that animates the stories on screen.
Belkin served as a consultant on the series, introducing the screenwriters to her old sources in Yonkers and fact-checking the look and feel of the production on set—right down to such period details as the lighting of city hall one fateful night in 1988. The result is a remarkably faithful adaptation, with many quotes pulled verbatim from Belkin’s reporting and most of the scenes shot in the real locations where they took place 30 years ago. “They wanted to make something honest,” she says.
