Our hearts go out to Dennis Farina’s family today. He’s a cultural icon, having walked this fine line between perfectly-plausible gangster and perfectly-plausible cop for so many years. We didn’t know that much about him until the outpouring of retrospectives today, and Vulture’s take was most striking, from the influenced.it perspective. Matt Zoller Seitz put together this remarkable mini-documentary about Crime Story, a show that was honestly not on our radar, but was an important predecessor to The Sopranos, The Wire, and the now well-established model of complex season-long story arcs.
http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/zen-pulp-pt-5-20090723
Jump to 6:05 for the discussion of Crime Story’s predecessors and followers.