Only In MA: Is Showtime's 'City On The Hill' A True Story?

Only In Massachusetts is an occasional series where Patch tries to find answers to questions about life in Massachusetts. Have a question about the Bay State that needs answering? Send it to dave.copeland@patch.com.

The very first episode of Showtime's "City On A Hill" opens with an inaccuracy, when FBI agent Jackie Rohr says Boston went soft when Mayor Ray Flynn sent the police in to break up a fight in the stands during a Bruins-Canadiens game.

It's never made clear if the coke- and booze-addled Rohr, played by Kevin Bacon, is misremembering the 1986 "Brawl In The Hall" and mixing memories with a 1979 Bruins game in Madison Square Garden, when players did go into the stands, or if the show's writer's took some liberties with the facts. But the reality is the players in the '86 game fought in the hallway outside the locker rooms, not the stands, and Flynn only suggested he would have sent police to intervene when he was asked about the incident later.

That's been a running quandary for fans of "City On A Hill" who lived in Boston in the early 1990s, when the show is set: The places and people that populate the show seem familiar, and sound a lot like the way we remember them. But when we check the facts, we learn that while there are some parallels to real life, the show is mostly fiction and its characters are mostly made up. This confusion has continued into the current second season, even though Showtime has been saying since the show premiered in 2019 that it's a work of fiction.

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For starters, Rohr and Decourcy Ward, the show's other lead character played by Aldis Hodge, were not real people. Rohr is a composite of John Connolly, H. Paul Rico and Dennis Condon, the three disgraced FBI agents who handled mob boss James "Whitey" Bulger when he turned informant. Ward is loosely based on Ralph Martin, who was Suffolk County's first Black prosecutor when appointed by Gov. William Weld in 1992 and took office with a mandate to clean up law enforcement.

Loyal watchers and proud Bostonians may also be disappointed to learn that producers used 2019 New York City as a stand-in for 1992 Boston. While some shots —including scenes outside the Statehouse and in Chinatown in the pandemic-delayed second season that premiered last month — were filmed in Boston, most of the show is filmed in New York. That has more to do with the rapid pace of development in Boston since 1993, and not a preference for a sound stage in Brooklyn.

"Change is good, and development can be good, but it’s definitely not 1992 Boston anymore," location manager Ryan Cook told Boston.com before the show's 2019 premiere.

Creator Chuck MacLean, along with producers Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, have mined real-life events to fuel the show's narrative arc. Affleck told The New York Times he drew on his research for "The Town," his 2010 film about Charlestown bank robbers, to lend the armored car robbery that underpins the show's first season. The fictional robbery is based on the 1997 conviction of five career criminals from Charlestown for 55 crimes in four states, including a 1994 robbery where the two guards were killed.

The show also explores tensions between police and Boston's Black community in the years following the 1989 Charles Stuart case. Stuart claimed his pregnant wife was shot and killed by a Black man in Mission Hill, prompting an aggressive police crackdown. Stuart even identified one of the men who was arrested and accused of killing his wife. Only later, and only after Stuart took a leap from the Tobin Bridge, did the true story emerge: Stuart killed his wife to collect on her life insurance policy.

The show also alludes to Harvard criminologist David Kennedy's "Boston Miracle." The ceasefire brought together Black leaders and police officers and is credited with a massive decline in gun violence in Boston. The model was later expanded to more than 70 other cities in the country.

But the program wasn't introduced until 1996, four years after the show's opening season takes place. That did not, however, stop The New York Times for calling the unlikely relationship between Rohr and Ward "an explicit allegory for" for the Boston Miracle, which was also known as Operation Ceasefire.

For some viewers, the show brings back uncomfortable memories of Boston's past racial tensions. But MacLean said the show depicts the "world I grew up in.

"It was important to show what it was really like and to be unsparing," MacLean told the Globe in 2019. "It was a town where someone would drop the N-bomb on you and not care and pay no consequences for it."

Dave Copeland is Patch's regional editor for Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island and can be reached at dave.copeland@patch.com or by calling 617-433-7851. Follow him on Twitter (@CopeWrites) and Facebook (/copewrites).