Gomorrah

The actual subject is the Sistema itself. The show argues, without ever quite saying so out loud, that Napoli's Camorra is a stable and self-reproducing economy with its own logic. Boys grow up wanting nothing else because there is nothing else. Mothers bury sons and raise the next ones up to take the same jobs. The drug money flows. The state is somewhere in the background, mostly absent. Police come through occasionally like weather.

That is what makes the show heavy in a way American crime drama rarely is. The Sopranos is about one man's personal crisis inside an organisation. Gomorrah is about the organisation. The individuals are cogs, even the charismatic ones, and the show never lets you forget it. It is closer in spirit to Suburra: Blood on Rome, which takes a similar view of Rome's underworld, or to the grinding hopelessness of The Wire in its attitude to institutions.

🎨 Style & Atmosphere

Stefano Sollima shot the first two seasons in a flat, grey, almost documentary register that the later seasons honoured. There are no Scorsese flourishes here. No needle drops to paper over a flat scene. No voiceover explaining how a soldier feels about what he just did. The camera watches. The edits are patient. Violence happens quickly and then is over.

The setting does a lot of the lifting. Le Vele di Scampia, the vast honeycomb housing estate that has since been partly demolished, appears in season one like a brutalist monument to the show's thesis. Secondigliano's tower blocks, tenement courtyards, scooter-clogged alleys, and half-finished concrete interiors are as much characters as the people. The Naples of Gomorrah has nothing to do with the postcard Naples of tourists. The bay and Vesuvius appear exactly twice that I remember, and only briefly. The show lives on the inland side of the hill.

The music is minimal and often electronic, pulsing under montage sequences where characters move from one piece of business to the next. Silence does more work than any score. When a scene needs weight, the show simply stops.

📈 Reception & Legacy

Critics loved it almost immediately. The series won the International Emmy for Best Drama and collected festival prizes across Europe. Reviewers from the Guardian, the New York Times, and the BBC all put it on best-of-decade lists for TV drama. It was the first Italian series to get a genuine global audience since the big Rai productions of the seventies.

Inside Italy the show was a cultural event and also a cultural argument. Politicians from Napoli accused it of glamorising the Camorra. Saviano and the producers pushed back that depicting an economy of violence is not endorsing it, and the show's refusal to give any character a clean redemption arc is part of that defence. You come out of Gomorrah wanting fewer Don Pietros in the world, not more.

The franchise expanded in 2019 with the spin-off film L'Immortale, directed by and starring Marco D'Amore, which fills in a piece of his character's backstory and bridges two phases of the TV show. If you like the series, the film is worth your time.

🏆 Why It Works

Gomorrah works because it refuses the usual deal. No likeable antihero. No redemptive love interest. No Tony Soprano therapist scenes where the audience gets permission to empathise. You watch terrible people do terrible things in a place that has run out of alternatives, and the show trusts you to sit with that.

I came to it expecting a lesser cousin of the American crime canon and left convinced it is one of the best crime dramas anyone has made. If you have already worked through The Sopranos, Boardwalk Empire, Breaking Bad, and Peaky Blinders, this is what you graduate to. Harder, colder, less forgiving. Five seasons long, no filler, no wasted episodes. Subtitles. Worth it.

Marco D'Amore

Lead Actor