received highly positive reviews from the American press upon release. On Metacritic, the first season of the show has a score of 87 out of 100 based on 7 professional reviews, indicating "[u]niversal acclaim". Tim Goodman, writing for San Francisco Chronicle, praised it for having "the kind of energy you don't get often on American television, and the realness of the shot-on-location scene really makes each episode feel like a minimovie." Whilst noting its stylistic similarities to City of God, Goodman wrote that "the series lacks the relentless violence of the film," even though "it's not without the same ominous sense of death." According to Charles McGrath of The New York Times, "[t]he closest American popular television has ever come to this kind of close-up realism is probably the drug-dealing scenes in "The Wire" on HBO, and even they seem a little tame and stagey compared with what takes place in Dona Marta." ""City of Men" is more than just a fictionalized documentary, though;" he continues, "it has real humor and sweetness, much of it derived from the interaction of Acerelo and Laranjinha, who are an inspired buddy pair." Slate's Troy Patterson wrote that it "smoothly toggles between working as a crime melodrama and a coming-of-age tale, as a harrowing piece of social commentary and a gentle bit of farce. It eludes genre categorization, but if one of the nihilistic children it depicts were to put his gun to my head, I’d say it was a situation comedy—one in which the situation is that life is both cheap and beautiful." Heather Havrilesky of Salon called it "[u]nlike anything else you've ever seen on TV." The Los Angeles Times Robert Lloyd took issue with the show's "occasional paroxysms of style or hammered-home points" in an otherwise positive review where he praised the show for its "immense vitality and persuasive naturalism". Sequel series In 2017 (10 years after the movie) a new series was aired, continuing the story about Laranjinha and Acerola, now fathers of their own sons: Davi (Luan Pessoa) and Clayton (Carlos Eduardo Jay), respectively. The boys have the same relationship as their fathers had when youngsters. Season 1 (2017) The first season follows the discovery of a fatal heart disease in Davi. The situation develops when Clayton steals money from a drug lord. Laranjinha wants to use the money to pay for his son's surgery, as Acelora fears retaliation