In 1983, Enzo Tortora was on top of the world — host of a television show watched by nearly half the population of Italy — when he suffered a fate that did not yet have a name: He was canceled.

Falsely accused by a motley crew of mobsters and other miscreants of being a drug-dealing member of the Camorra, he was jailed and convicted, hounded by the paparazzi and vivisected in the Italian newspapers. When he was acquitted on appeal in 1986, he returned to his show in triumph. But his health was broken, and he was off TV within a year and dead within two.

Today, assaulting a reputation with lies and innuendo is easily accomplished. It was not such a simple matter four decades ago, and the Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio has devoted six episodes and more than six hours to dramatizing all the confounding, astounding, heartbreaking details of Tortora’s story in “Portobello,” a mini-series that premieres on Friday, on HBO Max.

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