When asked to describe The Wire, journalist-turned-TV writer David Simon’s five-season meditation on crime and consequence in Baltimore, people often reach for “Dickensian,” because the series was a dense thicket of narratives and characters, tragic outcomes and unanswered questions. Some might also go for “grim,” because the show, with its reportorial frankness, depicted a city perhaps irreparably destroyed by racism, poverty, drugs, apathy. The Wire was definitely grim, and it was certainly knotty, and complicated; Dickens without the British whimsy.

But what made the series sublime, so sad and so stirring and so deeply human, was, I think, its weary hopefulness—not a blinkered optimism that broken systems might somehow fix themselves, but that lives might still change for the better within those systems, that there may still be some inherent goodness to how people interact with one another. When those people are all huddled and teeming together, in these places called cities, maybe there is some collective good, pooled together, that can—despite bigotry, predation, opportunism, greed—somehow, sometimes ennoble even the most downtrodden of lives. The Wire is a solemn document, but it also—despite itself, perhaps—possesses something like civic pride. David Simon is fascinated by how cities work, how they champion and fail people, and in that fascination there is, I think, a deep but only sometimes sentimental affection. The Wire, and his post-Katrina New Orleans series Treme, had genuine heart, buried though it often may have been under rubbly piles of concrete, dust, and despair.

Which makes Simon’s new HBO mini-series, the docudrama Show Me a Hero, all the more interesting. Here, Simon, and his co-writer, journalist William F. Zorzi, (the series is based on the book by Lisa Belkin) have placed the show’s heart more prominently on its sleeve. The six-part series, which follows the most volatile years of the epic fight to desegregate the city of Yonkers through housing law, is rousing and captivating. But it’s also more hushed, less explosive than The Wire ever was. The hues might be similar, all the weedy sidewalks and faded brick, but there are very few gunshots or violent crimes—well, physically violent, anyway—to be found. Show Me a Hero is instead about the intricacies of local government, set in the drab rooms where policy is made. This is not broad, intangible nationwide legislation. It’s immediate, and personal, which makes its setbacks all the more frustrating, its victories the more heartening.

The series follows ambitious young city councilman Nick Wasicsko, a middle-class cop turned lawyer, who found himself, for a brief but tumultuous time in the late 1980s, at the center of a citywide fight over low-income and affordable housing. A federal judge had ruled that Yonkers had to build a certain amount of housing units, spread evenly across the city, not just in black neighborhoods, which would effectively have created more ghettos. Many of the white people of Yonkers, especially those living on the more affluent east side of town, were vehemently opposed to this, afraid of crime and drugs and other elements invading and destroying their neighborhoods. A war was waged in the council, threatening to bankrupt the city, while a few pragmatic idealists—Nick, bit by bit, among them—tried to abide by the court’s ruling and, hopefully, do a little good.

It’s grinding, “two steps forward, one step back” stuff. But what Simon, Zorzi, and the series’s director, Paul Haggis, do beautifully is not solely lament the process, its intractability, its shitty compromises, but also revel in it. Here is change happening, slow and painful at times, but still happening. The series not only follows Nick’s city hall struggle, but several of the families that the new policies will come to affect, from a white woman fighting the ruling to several black and Latino families who would all benefit in various ways from moving out of their dangerous, decrepit public housing and into cleaner, safer homes. Show Me a Hero delineates the architectural theory behind successful public housing, it follows the small intrigues of midsize city elections, it tells seemingly simple domestic stories that unfold over years. That may sound slow, or dull, but in Haggis’s and the writers’ hands, it’s vital human drama, enriching and enlightening and, yes, entertaining.