“Show Me a Hero,” which David Simon began working on before he made “The Wire,” finds beauty in daily struggles. Illustration by Corey Brickley

In a scene midway through HBO’s “Show Me a Hero,” one that functions as a metonym for the series, a Yonkers city councilman named Hank Spallone—played with toothpick-chewing gusto by Alfred Molina—and a photographer drive through the Schlobohm housing projects. They’re hunting for images to inflame voters: lurid proof that poor black people come from “another culture.” But their presence also changes what they see. When their sedan lingers, two giggly teen-age girls go silent, then shoot their middle fingers up in defiance. Click goes the camera. Meanwhile, a weary older woman walks by, lugging groceries. The photographer raises his lens—but then doesn’t bother.

Written by David Simon and Bill Zorzi, directed with unshowy simplicity by Paul Haggis, and based on the excellent nonfiction book by Lisa Belkin, “Show Me a Hero” is an attempt to refocus that picture—to find beauty in daily struggles and civic courage, not in bad-boy fantasies. The six-episode miniseries, set in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, is a dramatization of the battle to desegregate Yonkers, punctuated by swigs of Maalox. As anyone who followed the real-life story knows—don’t Google it if you don’t want spoilers—it has one happy ending and one very sad one. (The title comes from F. Scott Fitzgerald: “Show me a hero, and I’ll write you a tragedy.”) It’s the latest effort by Simon, the creator of “The Wire” and “Treme,” to forge an effective model for the message drama, with plots torn not from the headlines but from the op-ed page. Well cast, solidly structured, and emotionally stirring, the show is as sincere as the Bruce Springsteen songs that make up its score, a ballad of pragmatism with a passionate heart. And, no, that’s not code for “boring.” The series builds and deepens, stanza by stanza, and then it soars.

To a large degree, this is because of Oscar Isaac, who plays Nick Wasicsko, in a star performance agile enough to elevate scenes that might veer into agitprop. When “Show Me a Hero” begins, Wasicsko, a former cop, a flirt in a thick Pacino mustache, gets picked by the Democrats to run for mayor, challenging the incumbent, who lost support over a judicial decree to build low-income housing. Wasicsko tells voters that he’ll fight the ruling, then wins big, becoming the nation’s youngest mayor. Only then must he face facts: any court appeal is doomed, and, anyway, would bankrupt the city. Somehow, he needs to make this unpopular plan work.

Right away, the white residents who elected Wasicsko turn against him. Civic meetings boil over into near-riots. Former supporters spit in his face. They rock his car, then shatter the windshield—and these scenes, filmed in the locations where the events the show is based on occurred, feel wild and kinetic, placing us right in the action. But Wasicsko barrels forward. What begins as practicality evolves into spiny principle: he’s a dreamy realist, a civic puzzle-solver, which proves to be its own kind of idealism. He builds bridges as they get wiped out. As his troubles increase, Wasicsko’s eyes become wells of need: he’s diligent, canny, a good listener, but he’s hooked on adoration.

The show’s wonkiest policy debates are also its liveliest scenes, as the white men who run the city wheedle to get that mysterious force worshipped by Donald Trump: leverage. In one scene, the city planner Oscar Newman (Peter Riegert, in an Amish beard) proposes scattering just a few town houses within each white neighborhood, to discourage the “criminal element.” An A.C.L.U. lawyer (the appealingly shaggy Jon Bernthal—few shows have made such a nostalgic case for men’s hair of the eighties) calls this racist. Newman doubles down, citing research. “Public-housing residents are no different than any other renters,” he argues later. “They will jealously guard and maintain what’s theirs.” He fights for specific features, like front yards facing the street. It’s clear that Simon and Zorzi are in Newman’s camp, which favors make-it-work facts over ideology, but the show also respects the debate’s prismatic quality: the judge has his priorities, as does HUD, as do the politicians hedging career bets. Even the bigoted residents, who cloak their fears in talk of property values, are flawed, human, and, in a few cases—as with one resident, played with warm humility by Catherine Keener—capable of change. It’s a dark take on politics, but a bright one on democracy.

If the show has a weak spot, it’s in the depiction of Schlobohm, with its grim canyons of drug dealers and struggling families. In the first few episodes, we get glimpses of four black and Latina women, all single mothers: a teen-ager with a criminal boyfriend; a laborer yearning for the kids she left behind in the Dominican Republic; a young widow; and an elderly health aide gone blind (the terrific LaTanya Richardson Jackson). The performances are solid, the real-life details affecting, but the stories feel stiff, disjointed, their peripheral quality underlined by aesthetic choices. (Springsteen dominates, while hip-hop leaks through doors.) It’s only once we get to the housing lottery that these plots click: there’s uneasy power in a shot of the women’s closed faces beside their kids’ open giddiness, praying for a Golden Ticket, even if that means living among strangers who hate them. It’s an ugly numbers game, but it’s the only one in town.

In interviews, Simon likes to call himself the “PBS of HBO.” And, truly, there’s something beautiful and Wasicsko-esque about his dogged desire for TV drama to reflect the best values of journalism. (He’s been working on “Show Me a Hero” since before “The Wire,” as the subject matter has become ever more relevant.) In an era of sociopaths and conspiracies that go all the way to the top, “Show Me a Hero” is less a breakthrough experiment than a refreshing throwback, echoing certain of the grittier, now forgotten network series of TV’s early decades, such as the social-worker procedural “East Side / West Side.” Simon’s shows are unashamed of their mission to educate and to illuminate, and, if advocating for them can make a critic feel as if she were hawking a standing desk, so be it.

But Simon is wrong to suggest that, for viewers, the choices are Yonkers or zombies. The truth is, progressive politics are experiencing a TV boom these days—a revival of the medium’s do-gooder legacy—but they’re often nested in genres taken less seriously: comedies, shows aimed at women and teens, sci-fi. Take CBS’s deceptively procedural-shaped “The Good Wife,” which has explored, with surprising granularity, the risks of N.S.A. surveillance and the insidious effects of big money on Democratic politics. Or ABC Family’s teen soap “The Fosters,” so sharp on judicial issues for kids in the foster system. TV’s most nuanced explorations of health care are on BBC’s “Call the Midwife,” set among Anglican nurse-midwives after the Second World War, and HBO’s mordant black comedy “Getting On,” about a geriatric ward corroded by for-profit funding. The most vivid critique of capitalism since “The Wire” was HBO’s humane “Enlightened”; later, in an entirely different genre, USA’s sizzling dystopia “Mr. Robot” picked up that radical thread. These shows make left-wing arguments without the signifiers of TV seriousness: realism, male protagonists, big-name Hollywood directors.