City Confidential

This series is informative and imaginative; Paul Winfield was excellent as the initial narrator. The stories span communities all across the U.S. exploring the ..."It would never happen here"...mechanism of denial that people use to insulate themselves.

Some of the series which are particularly interesting are shown in Lopez Island, Washington; horse country of Northern Illinois (the Helen Brach/Brach candy murder) and several other affluent communities.

This series taps into the American conscience; like Stephen King, the underlying unrest that may exist in some of the most beautiful and "perfect" neighborhoods. 9/10.

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.

The element that distinguishes City Confidential from its sister show, American Justice, and so many other true crime shows, is the background on the setting of the crime. Sometimes it's a whole half hour before we know who's been murdered (usually it's a murder) because we're learning about the environment of the crime. Sometimes the background takes a shorter portion of the show, but it's always fascinating to learn about small towns and big cities across the country. And the cases they choose to highlight are generally interesting.

I thought Paul Winfield's narration (from the beginning till his death in 2004) was as close to perfect as possible. The new narrator is fine, it's just that his voice is not as resonating as Winfield's. I'd love to hear James Earl Jones narrate -- but I doubt the producers could afford him!

City Confidential is a wonderful show that unfortunately has lost something with the death of its original narrator, Paul Winfield. The heavy sarcasm in the scripts suited his voice beautifully. However, the show's formula goes on without him. Each episode looks at a major scandal in a city - a scandal that usually belies the wealth, beauty, or old money residents of the area. What makes the series a cut above is the history given of each city and a profile of its typical residents at the time of the crime. And the narration! "Why, you could see the sweat roll off him as if it was a July day on the Bayou." The episodes also include interviews with residents, reporters, and witnesses.

All in all, City Confidential is a fascinating series. The new narrator is less intrusive, which says that the producers did not try to replace the flamboyance of Winfield. Probably a good move, because they couldn't have done so.