City Confidential

It's shows like this that is the reason I love A&E Network. Paul Winfield's narration is just masterful. I believe his voice is right up there with James Earl Jones and the late Robert Stack as one of the most powerful and recognizable in all of showbiz. The show can make the sleepiest of towns sound like a place you genuinely would want to be. I also love how they do a brief history of the towns before they get into the crimes that made them famous or infamous (you be the judge). It also gets extra kudos for doing a feature on my hometown, Baton Rouge.

Paul Winfield can make any small town or city fascinating. He could sell ice to Eskimos or anything else. The language and description of towns like Skidmore, Missouri, Fairbanks, Alaska, Seattle, Boston, Hunt Country, Virginia, Philadelphia, St. Augustine, Florida, and Salem, Massachusetts can entice people to visit these places and buy the books about the famous crimes that have occurred there. He is a wonderful narrator of this show. He makes everything so trivial and mundane about these towns to be exotic and captivating. Winfield died and they replaced him with a narrator just as wonderful as Paul was in the role. Still it makes you wonder about your own hometown, what makes it special, unique and it's character to the other ones depicted on City Confidential. My favorite episode was Salem known for more than the witches. If you listen to his voice, it's like listening to poetry sometimes. He points out the irony and how a town will recover from it's crimes.

I wish Amazon Prime and other apps would get this show, I can't even find it on reruns. This was one of the best series ever. I love the way Paul wenfield narrated the show for five years I believe, and then after he passed someone else narrated it another two years. It was a excellent show, to every episode had a 10! details were on point and then they always got the right guy free and the wrong guy / the bad guy locked up where they belong!!!

Who can forget the deeply resonant voice with a slightly cynical twang narrating "City Confidential"? That narration seemed in integral part of this outstanding series of intriguing case histories.

On the 7th of this month (March, 2004) Paul Winfield died. It's hard to imagine "City Confidential" without him. Although he was never seen, his narration became the series on-going "star," tightly wedded to the well written scrips.

On this month's occasion it seems fitting to pay tribute to the memory of this Emmy-award-winning actor, who so enriched our lives with his rich body of work, from the sixties through this year.

In a period in which many black actors digressed into the "blaxsploitation" genre, Winfield remained completely dignified in his career choices, and steadfastly dedicated to his craft. (His work in "Sounder" and "Roots" are indelibly imprinted in our minds.)

While "Confidential" moves on to another narrator, the Winfield years will remain a lasting, rich legacy in the recollections of many series viewers.

Winfield's oily narration is fantastic, and compelling enough on its own to make the show a must-see. Every simple fact he relates seems to be bringing him great pleasure, both sinister and, ahem, lascivious. He can say "Amityville, New York" and it will sound de-li-cious, like he's really a old guy at the bar blessed with a great voice, reminiscing about some tawdry encounter he had as a youth. Good stuff!