Discovery wants to be a made cable channel, orders Five Families mob drama from Goodfellas guys

By Sean O'Neal | October 14, 2013 | 9:24pm

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Realizing that all those goody-good channels who work their specialty programming for bum ratings are dead—they're suckers, they have no balls—Discovery has decided it no longer wants to live its life like some ordinary cable schnook. It's getting into the original programming racket. It's gonna be a made channel, as The Hollywood Reporter says Discovery is teaming with the Goodfellas duo of writer Nicolas Pileggi and producer Irwin Winkler to get its button with The Five Families, a dramatic account of the founding of the Gambino, Genovese, Lucchese, Bonanno, and Colombo crime families that have provided us with so many entertaining murders over the years.

Like so much on Discovery already, Five Families will be based on facts—facts that are way more entertaining when you mix them up with speculation and exaggeration, like a regular shark mixed with a dinosaur. It will also continue to ensure that no era of the American Mafia goes without a movie or TV show to document it, in this case picking up where Boardwalk Empire leaves off on its timeline, and possibly filling that gap before the 1950s/1960s time period of Winkler and Pileggi’s Goodfellas series at AMC. Now we just need a series about that weekend in 1981 when “Big Paul” Castellano got a penile implant and we’ll be all set.