Show me a Hero (parts 2 and 3)

Excessive length is the curse of most TV mini-series and this rule applies to the third and fourth hours of Show me a Hero.  In the third episode, the desegregation crisis reaches its climax, Mayor Wasicsko, finally, secures a city council vote to implement the court-ordered housing plan, and, then, loses his bid for a second term -- Yonkers elects a mayor every two years.  At loose ends, Wasicsko putters around the house that he has bought, does home improvements, and listens to his Bruce Springsteen cassettes.  The urgency and most of the interest leaks out of the show and the focus, now, shifts to the annals of the deserving and undeserving poor.  Here we are mostly on familiar terrain and, despite good intentions, the plight of the poor is intrinsically undramatic -- indeed, to be poor is to be denied the opportunity of any kind of meaningful narrative and so the show sags considerably at its midpoint.  With Wasicsko becalmed -- the movie kills time by tracking him to a Home Depot where he buys supplies for his handyman projects -- the emphasis is on drug-dealing, teenage pregnancy, delinquency of various sorts, and the strivings of hardworking people who don't earn enough to make ends meet.  A group of "Dead-Enders" continues increasingly futile protests about the public housing being built in largely White neighborhoods, but it seems obvious that these demonstrations are merely expressions of racism and have no other purpose.  Although much of this material is not only dull but predictable there are effective moments and some of the subplots are vaguely compelling if unclear -- a woman from the Dominican Republic is separated from her children; the program doubles everything to use up its allotted six hours and we get not one but two tearful reunions at the airport with her kids.  It's not clear why this woman left Yonkers in the first place, unclear why she went back to New York, and her situation with her boyfriend or ex-husband (the father of her children), a kind of squalid calamity, isn't really defined.  A home health aide who has gone blind due to untreated diabetes casually remarks that she doesn't want to live with White people in any event -- "I want to stay with my own kind", echoing the exhausted words of a NAACP lawyer in the first episode:  "They don't want to live with us.  And I don't know that we want to live with them..."  Haggis cleverly intercuts a row of White pensioners waiting to cast their vote with a queue of Black folks who turn out to be standing in line for a fix from their drug dealer.  One scene in which a Puerto Rican nurse descends an elevator occupied largely by thuggish looking gang-bangers tells you about all you want to know about the reasons for skepticism about whether integration can possibly work.  The grand design of the work remains visible through all the clichés and we can sense that the film is moving in an arc to suggest the redemption of the community through desegregation, certainly a worthy and majestic theme and one that is well worth dramatizing.  But not much happens in these two episodes and the annals of the poor are more or less obvious and not too compelling and Haggis loiters on bathetic scenes involving Wasicsko babbling to his Dad at his father's grave (scenes that have some ominous force because I have cheated, checked Wikipedia, and I know that the hero will commit suicide by that grave at age 34).  There's too many life-affirming montages cut to Bruce Springsteen anthems and at about the 3 and 1/2 hour mark, the show flags to the point that Simon and Haggis have to tart it up with some gratuitous sex and nudity -- an exhibition of the leading lady's nipples that is completely unnecessary and embarrassing for all concerned.  But this is standard protocol for HBO and the scenes involving the climactic vote on the desegregation have an alarming fury and power so that I anticipate the show will regain its stride in the final two episodes.  But why waste ninety minutes more or less on uninteresting stuff?  It would show more integrity to remain true to the vision of the film in the first two hours and shorten this middle act by half.