What’s The Deal With Ed Koch on ‘The Get Down’?

Though The Get Down is not a true story, it makes sure to root itself in a very real time and place. New York City — and particularly the Bronx — in 1977, the height of disco and the dawn of the hip-hop movement. The latter gets a boost of verisimilitude in the story by having real-life hip-hop legend Grandmaster Flash as a character (he’s played by Mamoudou Athie). But Grandmaster Flash isn’t the real-life character on the show in the first six episodes. Frank Wood portrays Ed Koch, future mayor of New York City and a pivotal figure in New York history. One whose often infamous place in the evolution of the city has often been remarked upon by TV and movies.

In The Get Down, the 1977 mayoral campaign is in full swing, and Koch is looking to secure support in the Bronx. This leads to an uneasy alliance between Koch and Papa Fuerte (Jimmy Smits), two men who don’t think much of one another. But Koch needs votes, and Fuerte needs support for his pie-in-the-sky housing proposition, so the men make a deal. But aligning with Koch isn’t easy for a man repping the south Bronx (as Ezekiel ultimately finds out when he too is asked to mascot for the Koch campaign). While Koch was a Democrat — the ’77 election was essentially decided between two Democrats, Koch and future New York governor Mario Cuomo — he campaigned along a lot of the same lines that future NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani would: law and order, cleaning up our streets, et cetera. Where Giuliani once made pan-handling window-washers his pet cause, Koch was on a crusade against graffiti. “This may not be our most pressing concern,” a savvy Koch says about graffiti in The Get Down‘s fourth episode. “The plebeians, the average Joes, they hate it. And they love it when I rail against it.” This spells trouble for, among others, Jaden Smith’s Dizzee, the show’s resident graffiti artist.

As mayor through the late ’70s and almost all of the ’80s, Koch holds a particularly prominent place in New York history. And his enigmatic personal life — he was a lifelong bachelor, dogged with rumors about being gay, which he always denied — combined with the fact that he was mayor during the advent of the AIDS crisis, when early public funding could have saved thousands of lives, Koch has always been a lightning rod in the gay community. In the documentary How to Survive a Plague and the HBO film version of The Normal Heart, Koch is the frequent target of activist Larry Kramer’s attacks against an establishment that refused to help a gay community that was dying.

In John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus, Mitchell writes a character who is not nominally Koch, but essentially is a Koch-like figure: an old man in a New York City gay bar, who says he used to be the mayor, lamenting the life he spent in the closet and how he failed during the AIDS crisis. (clip includes cutaways to NSFW scenes)

Including a figure like Koch, whose race-baiting and sexuality have made him even more of a controversial figure in hindsight, in The Get Down obviously feels it’s important to root the story in the history and politics of its time. Ultimately, Koch is a figurehead character; his fictional political mastermind, Mr. Gunns (Michel Gill) takes the hand-off and becomes the show’s true political villain, unbound by requirements for historical accuracy. But it’s Koch whose name holds a decade’s worth of New York history; of turbulent, changing times that weren’t always good, and when progress wasn’t always progressive. That seems to be the story of The Get Down too.