Gomorrah vs Breaking Bad: Italian prosecutors say one of them makes gangsters likable

Gomorrah ran on Sky Atlantic in Italy from 2014 to 2021, five seasons and 58 episodes, built from Roberto Saviano's 2006 book about the Camorra, the Naples mafia. It follows the Savastano clan: boss Pietro, his son Genny, and Ciro Di Marzio, the soldier who wants more. Sight & Sound called it "Italy's answer to Breaking Bad," and the comparison stuck.

Both shows are about men who sell drugs and get very good at it. Only one of them got into a public argument with Italy's top prosecutors.

What the prosecutors said

The loudest objections came from the top of Italy's anti-mafia system:

• Federico Cafiero de Raho, then the national anti-mafia prosecutor, said "it humanizes gangsters."
• Nicola Gratteri, then chief prosecutor in Catanzaro, went further: "It makes them seem likable, which is dangerous."
• Giuseppe Borrelli, a senior anti-mafia magistrate, said "the series fails to capture any aspect of today's Camorra."

The mayor of Naples joined in. Luigi de Magistris, a former magistrate himself, claimed in 2019 that violence in the city rose on the nights new episodes aired, and called the show's characters "eroi di merde." The translation is roughly what it looks like.

The haircut problem

Gratteri, now Naples' chief prosecutor, came back to it in May 2024, in a church in Scampia, the Naples neighborhood where much of Gomorrah is set. Answering questions from local schoolchildren, he described the moment a show goes wrong for him: when, after watching it, a boy wears "his hair like the killer he saw on TV."

His complaint wasn't about the violence alone. It was about who's missing from the screen.

His worry, Gratteri said, is a story where "no police officer, magistrate, priest, or teacher ever appears."

He was careful to add that he wasn't calling for censorship: "non si tratta di tarpare le ali all'arte," roughly, "this isn't about clipping art's wings."

How Breaking Bad is built differently

Breaking Bad has the kind of characters Gratteri says Gomorrah is missing. Walter White's brother-in-law, Hank Schrader, is a DEA agent and one of the show's leads. Walt himself is a chemistry teacher. The man chasing the drug lord comes to the family barbecues.

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And Vince Gilligan never pretended Walt was a hero. He pitched the show as a transformation in one line.

"You take Mr. Chips and turn him into Scarface," Gilligan told NPR's Fresh Air.

The point was the slide, not the swagger. "The character starts off as a protagonist and gradually becomes the antagonist," Gilligan said. Gomorrah starts its characters inside the Camorra and keeps them there, so there's no Mr. Chips to lose.

Saviano's answer

Saviano has heard the argument for two decades and has a short reply. Asked in April 2026 whether Gomorrah pushed young people toward crime, he called the idea "un'idiozia," an idiocy, and pointed out that kids in Naples were taking up weapons back in the days of the Bourbon kings.

Blaming the story, Saviano said, is "a self-defense mechanism for those who should be handling it."

For the record: in 2021, police near Naples arrested Carlo Cuccia, who had a small part as a lookout in Gomorrah's second season. Investigators said he was the Italian contact for Spanish drug suppliers working with a Secondigliano clan.

Previously we wrote: Why does R.J. Decker season 2 have only 7 episodes? The finale has aired, and ABC still hasn't announced season 3