Chicagoland premiered last night on CNN. It was the first installment of an eight-part series made by the same crew that gave us Brick City, the noted 2009 documentary series on Newark, N.J.

The premiere set the stage by offering flash introductions to Chicago’s mayor, political history, police superintendent, gang crisis and staggering murder rate. The documentarians take us to a school in the Southside, where a student had been beaten to death four years prior. (The incident was captured in a video clip that went viral.)

There, we have the episode’s focus: Mayor Rahm Emanuel has marked 53 schools in depopulating areas for closure, as the school district stares down a $1 billion deficit. But the closures don’t only mean that certain communities will lose their schools and feel the brunt of major layoffs. They also mean that students funneled elsewhere may have longer walks through turbulent gang zones. Indeed, a class action lawsuit is filed to halt the closings, arguing that they put students with disabilities at risk.

Do we hear from kids who have been caught in the crosshairs? Of course we do. Here is the part that left me wanting to spend five hours on Upworthy:

We meet Ariana, a girl still recovering physically and psychologically after being shot in the head while jumping rope with her cousin. Her mother says she’s been teased about the shooting, which her cousin didn’t survive. A man on the porch next door asks how kids like Ariana are supposed to study. It’s a good question.

Then, we see her mother again, only at night. Ariana’s stepfather was shot outside of her home. Her mother was with him and, clearly traumatized, speaks about how it happened.

Chicago saw 500 homicides in 2012, a number for which Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy was thoroughly lambasted. (McCarthy called the gang problem “intractable.”) We overhear from a school principal talking to staff about how Ariana’s stepfather was a high-ranking gang official. A color-coded map of the city by gang territory is displayed; it resembles one that has circulated in the Chicago press. With more than 70,000 gang members in the city, it’s clear that pension debt isn’t Chicago’s only massive problem. But I’m sure the producers will get to that, too.

This is not a docuseries that leans on poetic camera shots, a la Werner Herzog films. It doesn’t leave you feeling like you really the know the characters, either, despite following the mayor between meetings and engagements. Instead, it is fast-paced journalism that places the issues on the table and makes sure you understand their import. As the teacher’s union and community activists blast Emanuel for not budging on the closures, for instance, the biggest takeaway is that the book balancing has left a ton of people devastated.

We will recap each episode of Chicagoland. Let us know what you think of the series in the comments. Oh, and if you’re wondering who the narrator with the coarse Chicago accent is, it’s co-producer and DNAinfo reporter Mark Konkol. “[T]he New York Times describes [me] as ‘gruff-talking,’” he writes, “a description my mother disagrees with.”

Cassie Owens is a regular contributor to Next City. Her writing has also appeared at CNN.com, Philadelphia City Paper and other publications.

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