Pretty much every Chicagoan who has traveled abroad has a version of this story: You tell people in India or Japan or France that you are from Chicago and they immediately respond with some variation on "Oh, Al Capone. Bang bang." Imagine then how Chicagoans, myself included, feel when we learn that the eight-part CNN series with the sweeping, epic-scaled title "Chicagoland" focuses on the undeniably terrible problems with violence and failing schools, especially in neighborhoods that are predominantly home to African-Americans. Is violence and failure the only reputation we have in the world?
The subject is worthy of a series, of course, particularly in the wake of Rahm Emanuel's closing of 51 schools and the seemingly endless roll-call of shooting victims. Things got so bad a few years ago that the nickname "Chi-raq" became popular. When Emanuel decided to close so many schools, a major concern was that gang territories had been stabilized in neighborhoods such that kids going to school knew whose turf they were on and affiliations protected them. Close those schools and consolidate the population and suddenly kids were crossing into rival gang territory, with those unaffiliated with any gang caught in the crossfire.
But after a while, it feels as though some things are missing, and their absence is deeply felt. Serious analysis of the problems isn't on the menu. We get some troubling statistics (In Chicago in 2012, three quarters of all murder victims were African-American, though African Americans make up only a third of the city's population), but no deeper look at causes or systemic problems. And since the series shows 'good actors' doing good actions for seemingly all the right reasons, we're left with a telling absence; where are the voices of the people doing the shooting? You've heard of victimless crime, but this series is all victims and heroes, with no perpetrators or sense of what their lives are like.
That's not to say that this isn't interesting television. Emanuel, love him or hate him, is fascinating to watch as he adjusts his talk to fit his audience, from little kids to cops to administrators to celebrities. And Elizabeth Dozier ought to have been the subject of a whole series of her own. But by its title and its intermittent claims to being about the city as a whole, and by making the story of violence and schools about a small group of personalities, "Chicagoland" feels like a bigger, more emotionally engaging version of "Al Capone. Bang bang."