Dapper, I have not found a source other than Variety and The New York Times. Every month they post the best new show or series.
I just try to remember to check each month.
A very good documentary series that I have been watching on Netflix is called Flint Town.
A partial review:
Flint Town Is an Alarming Portrait of Cops, Politics, and a Reeling City
By Matt Zoller Seitz
Not many TV shows can be as transporting as a well-made, long-form documentary series about a specific time and place. Flint Town is that kind of series. It takes you to a place that you probably wouldn’t visit unless someone you knew already lived there, a place that Hollywood’s fiction makers would likely never go, either, because so much of the dramatic landscape consists of deprivation, disappointment, and constant challenges, none of which will be solved by the arrival of a clever hero who doesn’t play by the rules.
In their Netflix docuseries, director-cinematographers Zackary Canepari, Jessica Dimmock, and Drea Cooper spend a year embedded with the police department of Flint, Michigan, a city reeling from a series of vicious blows to its body politic, sustained over a period of decades.
First, General Motors, the city’s biggest employer, closed plants, laid off workers, and ultimately relocated to the suburbs (a move subsidized by the city of Flint itself). Then came the water crisis, which started when the city changed the source of its drinking water to the Flint River to save money but failed to treat the water properly, exposing more than 100,000 residents to lead contaminants.
The city depicted in Flint Town is a husk of its former self, and so is the police force that provides its focus. Despite its simple yet sweeping title, the series focuses on the day-to-day challenges of the city’s police department. It’s ultimately less of a “portrait of a city” documentary than a Cops-style look at the particulars of police work that just happens to be set in Flint, with artier, more atmospheric filmmaking (lot of tight, abstracted close-ups of objects illuminated by flashing red-and-blue lights), a much more frank assessment of how race and class issues affect community relations, and the kinds of glimpses of the officers’ home lives that the Fox series abandoned early in its run.
The overall erosion of Flint and the cratering of its police department are intertwined, of course: In 2016, one of the African-American officers featured in the series, Brian Willingham, wrote a New York Times editorial that asked, “How can citizens in Flint trust the police to protect them when they can’t even trust their government to provide them with clean water?” But for the most part, Flint Town considers these issues in a universalizing way that could apply to any police department in any city with a diverse population.
As the series tells us, this is an underfunded and understaffed department scrambling just to get by. When the story starts in November 2015, the Flint P.D. has just 98 officers, down from 300 a few years earlier, and daily police work looks and sounds a lot like triage. An early call by Officer Bridgette Balasko sees her responding to a robbery 27 hours after the initial phone call.
The rest of the story sees a change in management at both city hall (the election of Mayor Karen Weaver) and the police department (Tim “Two Guns” Johnson). The latter responds to an unconscionably high crime rate by promising to implement a more aggressive, “broken windows” style of policing that puts the citizenry on edge. The newest batch of 18 recruits includes a pair of officers who’d be criticized as too contrived if they appeared in a fiction series: Dion Reed and his mother Maria.
As intelligent and considerate as it is, the series has a somewhat repetitious feel until the third episode, which jumps ahead to July 2016, six months into the Chief Johnson’s tenure. From here through the end of the story, Flint Town shows how the mentality of American police is shaped by their personal politics, which in turn are shaped by their consistently unpleasant and sometimes fearful experiences on the job, as well as reactionary and sometimes racist attitudes handed down throughout the inception of modern policing.
The series eventually starts weaving community reaction to the police into the story more insistently, in a way that creates dialogue between the officers and the public they’re supposed to protect and serve. Rather than just show how civilians react during traffic stops or at town meetings, the filmmakers have them sit for interviews (framed head-on, in the manner of a mid-period Errol Morris documentary) and go into nonpolice locales, such as Melly’s barbershop, where the predominantly African-American clientele speak freely.
http://www.vulture.com/2018/03/flint...ix-review.html