Fear City: Netflix viewers ‘hooked’ on new crime documentary hailed as ‘real-life version of The Wire’

Three-part series follows Mafia families in 1970s New York

Fear City, a new crime documentary on Netflix that has been compared to The Wire, has got viewers “hooked”.

The three-part series, brought to screens by the creators of Don’t F*** With Cats, looks back at New York in the 1970s and 1980s, when five Mafia families “ruled” the city and federal agents were on a mission to take them down.

It includes interviews with former Mafia members turned informants and the FBI.

According to iNews writer Gabriel Tate, the show “makes Martin Scorsese look tame” and the Radio Times‘s Helen Daly even described it as the “real-life version of The Wire“ – the award-winning, Baltimore-set crime drama that follows the war between drug kingpins and law enforcement agencies.

The Hollywood Reporter's Daniel Fienberg, however, said that while the documentary tells a “good story” and is “occasionally entertaining”, it is “never revelatory” given that half its interviewees have told their stories before.

Vox’s critic, Alissa Wilkinson, was not impressed. She said the “tedious and vapid” series totally fails to acknowledge that “the past is barely in the past”.

Read some of the first Twitter reactions, which were overwhelmingly positive, below.

Read our list of every movie and TV show coming to Netflix this month.

Fear City is available on Netflix now.