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- Netflix
- Mar 2, 2018
- Netflix
- Mar 2, 2018
Summary Directors Drea Cooper and Zackary Canepari along with photojournalist Jessica Dimmock followed the police department as they dealt with crime and budget cuts for over a year as the city of Flint welcomed a new mayor and new police chief.
- Netflix
- Mar 2, 2018
- Netflix
- Mar 2, 2018
Summary Directors Drea Cooper and Zackary Canepari along with photojournalist Jessica Dimmock followed the police department as they dealt with crime and budget cuts for over a year as the city of Flint welcomed a new mayor and new police chief.
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Metascore
Universal Acclaim
Based on 5 Critic Reviews
83
100% Positive
5 Reviews
5 Reviews
0% Mixed
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
Metascore
Universal Acclaim
Based on 5 Critic Reviews
83
100% Positive
5 Reviews
5 Reviews
0% Mixed
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
Flint is a timebomb, and Flint Town is an impressively crafted tick-tock of things going wrong with a place, one after another.
Flint Town doesn’t offer easy solutions, but it does provide something valuable: a calm, reasoned presentation of the hope for another idea expressed in that speech given in the aftermath of Dallas, “that we are not as divided as we seem.”
User Score
Mixed or Average
Based on 25 User Ratings
5.8
56% Positive
14 Ratings
14 Ratings
16% Mixed
4 Ratings
4 Ratings
28% Negative
7 Ratings
7 Ratings
User Score
Mixed or Average
Based on 25 User Ratings
5.8
56% Positive
14 Ratings
14 Ratings
16% Mixed
4 Ratings
4 Ratings
28% Negative
7 Ratings
7 Ratings
A candid look inside a police community in a broken city as it deals with the cultural changes brought on by social media backlash in recent years. Several reviewers seem confused about the dissonance at play here. The police's preferred strong/morally righteous identity is seen being challenged in real time by growing insecurity (fear) brought on by actions of other officers that are difficult at times to rationalize. There isn't a lot of apparent messaging from the filmmakers themselves here. This is a documentary after all. It's just a look at the police and the city of Flint as told by themselves.
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SEASON 1
Great documentary. I guess I wasn't as educated on everything that was going on in Flint because I definitely felt like I took something away from it, unlike some of the other user reviews I'm reading here. Personally, I'm glad they showed both perspectives. I don't feel like it's the director's job to form an opinion for you
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SEASON 1
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.
What the filmmakers show is all worth a look, and maybe a second one. (Residents get a say too; note the inevitable, but never unwelcome, black barber shop scene.) It opens you up to different, conflicting points of view--or at least reminds you that they exist--which is just what you want from such a series.
Though it may be sloppy and inconsistent at times, Flint Town also looks beautiful.
A rather depressing look at a town in severe poverty with essentially no future. This is first and foremost a docudrama about a few cops in Flint, old and new. There is an ENORMOUS amount of flashing blue and red lights all through the show which gets pretty annoying. There is a fair amount of pandering and brainwashing going on here too.
What's strange, is they will show a team in what appears to be a quiet neighborhood, raid a home, slam down a door and run in with guns SCREAMING at people. I'm not sure what angle they were trying to show here but these scenes are pretty visceral and it just doesn't shine a good light on the cops. They conveniently NEVER get a hardened criminal on the scene, it's mostly just kids who ran a stop light or something similar. This creates a major imbalance in the perception of the town from the viewers perspective.
Towards the end, there is a scene where the citizens are practically begging for cops to be walking the streets everywhere, it's oddly dystopian and really shines a light on how some cultures/societies put very little stock in the idea of "personal responsibility" and just want to cry "we need help" and place their blame on everyone but themselves.
They do touch on some of the complex issues of how enforcing certain laws (like towing cars) will just create more problems. Clearly this town is in a lose lose scenario.
Basically, it's Cops with personal stories and great cinematography. Too much time is spent on slow motion scenes, huge bass drops during a drone scene over the town, in your face shots of a police lights, and listening to the chief of police struggle to form a coherent complete sentence. They spend a lot of time in the briefing room of the officers before shift and not enough time getting into the details. These ideas are touched on but never dug into. It's more about the personal drama of a few officers and illuminating just how miserable they are all.
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SEASON 1
It was beautifully shot, but as a whole FLINT TOWN really didn't go anywhere. A great documentary has gripping drama that anchors it, even with rampant crime, poverty, urban blight, a poisoned public water system, and a financially strapped Police Department, there wasn't anything holding this show together, as show. There wasn't anything that happened during the show that you wouldn't expect to happen. Documentaries that are in the right place at the right time, WHEN something major happens (unusually bad & scandalous), are the ones that play best, this one just didn't have that going for it.
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SEASON 1
The show was beautifully filmed, but it was hard to understand what point the documentary maker was trying to make. On one hand it felt like they were trying to put across an incredibly pro-police view, and make them out to be the victims, but on the other it highlighted the utter farcical nature of US policing - classic shoot first think later mentality which leaves them clearly as the problem, not the victims of the problem.
It didn't tell us anything we didn't already know, we already knew US police forces were full of people who genuinely want to improve things but can't, but also full of racist undereducated people who have literally no idea how to protect people and win communities over and who are simply part the problem.
So whilst the filmography was fantastic, it was ultimately hard to take anything meaningful away - it would almost be best viewed as a comedy, if it weren't for the fact that the farcically poor nature of the policing shown and the abysmally low quality of some of the officers meant we also had to see the horrific consequences, such as two dogs violently and pointlessly killed by the police and their bodies just thrown out with the trash as if they were nothing - that's not exactly going to win hearts and minds.
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SEASON 1
User scores better reflect the quality of this effort (and shows in general). It's beautifully done, but doesn't go beyond what is already known about the situation in Flint. It ends up feeling like any other cop show. If it provided more than just the perspective of the police and told the broader story--the story we don't get from the news--it might have been more interesting and enlightening. We see the police perspective in the news and in about half of the tv shows. The high professional reviews are puzzling.
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SEASON 1
