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Some television series, beyond their ability to represent real or fantasized urban worlds, are also a good entry point into the processes, systems of actors, tools and instruments that govern urban production. As such, they can be of use for educational purposes in urban planning, and help to make these culturally anchored systems of urban production intelligible.We focus on the benefit of using Show Me a Hero, a miniseries retracing the battle for housing desegregation in Yonkers, a suburb of New York, in a teaching module entitled “Controversies in urban planning”. Its use triggered three main topics of discussion: (1) the difficulty of implementing federal housing policies at local level, (2) the unpacking of the specificities of segregation processes, and (3) the understanding of the authors’ artistic biases as a condition for the analysis of the controversy.