LOS ANGELES — David Simon originally went to HBO with the idea to adapt Lisa Belkin’s book “Show Me a Hero” — which chronicled the racial and political unrest surrounding a housing project in Yonkers, N.Y. — shortly after he had concluded work on his acclaimed 2000 series “The Corner,” which wrestled with some of the same issues.
But a few other of the writer-producer’s projects for HBO would get in the way, namely “The Wire,” “Generation Kill,” and “Treme.” Now Simon, fellow co-writer and executive producer William Zorzi, and HBO are finally bringing the six-episode miniseries to the air, beginning Sunday at 8 p.m.
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“Show Me a Hero” follows city councilman-turned-mayor Nick Wasicsko — played by Oscar Isaac (“Inside Llewyn Davis”) — as he struggles with forced desegregation and opposition to public housing in the late 1980s.
Isaac said he was drawn to the project in part because of the timeliness of the series’ core questions about race and class, and because “Hero” was different from previously told civil rights and political stories. “I read it and I thought what an incredible story, incredible because it happened not so long ago and not so far away,” he said. “It happened in New York in the late ’80s, early ’90s. It wasn’t in the ’60s in Alabama.”
Isaac, who spoke via satellite, said he “fell in love” with Wasicsko, at the time the youngest big-city mayor in the United States and under enormous pressure. “I really wanted to try to understand who he was and tell that story.”
Isaac is part of a large ensemble cast that includes Alfred Molina, LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Winona Ryder, Peter Riegert, and Jim Belushi.
The early part of the series focuses largely on Wasicsko and the city’s political conflicts. Members of the community poised to move into the housing project play a more prominent role as the series progresses, which is how the story played out in reality, said Simon, explaining why the white characters are the main drivers of “Show Me a Hero.”
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“The reality is that we are dealing with a government at the time in Yonkers that was wholly white and had complete agency for what happened politically and what the decisions were going to be or not be, which was part of the problem in a very fundamental way,” Simon said. “There was no outlet for black political action or Latino political action in Yonkers at any point. And you start to see that in the last couple episodes, of course, when the housing gets built and when the people are chosen to move in, that’s when ordinary people start having agency in the piece and when I think the piece expands, and appropriately so.
“The great irony,” noted Simon, “is that two towns north [of Yonkers] in Tarrytown, the same fight with the same rhetoric, the same demagoguery is going on right now.”
Sarah Rodman can be reached at srodman@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @GlobeRodman