After “The Sopranos” ended its eight-year run on HBO, in 2007, the cable channel’s other programming had to suffer frequent unfavorable comparisons with that series. Over time, though, the droning voices of critics (this one among them) and unpaid viewers lamenting what seemed to be a fall from greatness have grown quieter. For one thing, with “The Sopranos” off the air “The Wire” started to get the attention it deserved. And, for better or for worse, HBO was freed from the constant, expectant scrutiny of viewers by the excellent shows that cropped up on other cable channels. If there was some slack in HBO’s offerings, Showtime and AMC made up for it; by last year, AMC’s “Breaking Bad” and “Mad Men” had become appointment television for increasing numbers of obsessive fans. But HBO’s breather is about to end, with the première, on September 19th, of “Boardwalk Empire,” a series set in Atlantic City during Prohibition, about which one feels that it’s fair to say “It’s no ‘Sopranos,’ ” because it doesn’t just invite comparison with the earlier series—it demands it.
“Boardwalk Empire” was created by Terence Winter, a writer and producer (and, by the end, an executive producer) of “The Sopranos,” and several of “The Sopranos” ’s directors, such as Alan Taylor, Allen Coulter, and Tim Van Patten, are also connected with it. The star of the series is Steve Buscemi, who played Tony Soprano’s unsettling cousin, and who directed several episodes of “The Sopranos,” including one—“Pine Barrens”—that is a classic of black comedy, ranking high on almost everyone’s list of the best TV episodes of all time. Presiding—looming, so to speak—over the enterprise is Martin Scorsese, who is the show’s co-executive producer. “Boardwalk” is Scorsese’s first foray into television (except for “The Blues,” a group of seven documentary films that he executive-produced, each by a director with a distinct signature), and it’s seemingly perfect for him: the story of a larger-than-life, charismatic, canny man, who controls Atlantic City like a Mafia boss, with an army of not always controllable underlings—sometimes comic, sometimes dangerous, sometimes both at once—and whose good works are made possible by corruption.
And yet, as familiar as this shaky moral ground is to Scorsese, you’d think the setting, the particular history of Atlantic City, would give him a chance to do something fresh. The series, which will have twelve episodes this year, takes place at a moment of huge change—it’s the end of the war, the beginning of Prohibition, and women are about to gain the right to vote. We’re aware, as we watch the doings in “the world’s playground,” that still more change—the city’s death and its eventual renewal, if you want to call it that—waits far in the future, and we identify with the grabbiness with which people go after opportunity, with the melancholy that seems to suffuse the salt air, and with the jazzy tunes performed by the night-club orchestras.
Buscemi plays Enoch (Nucky) Thompson—an undisguised if not entirely factual version of Enoch (Nucky) Johnson, the political boss who ruled Atlantic City with, as they say, an iron fist for three decades, ending in 1941, when he was convicted of tax evasion. That crime was a mere twig in the forest of the crimes and misdemeanors of Nucky’s career, and gives little indication of his role as pleasure poo-bah and godlike benefactor. (The series is drawn from a book of the same name by Nelson Johnson, no relation to Nucky, a lifelong resident of the area and now a superior-court judge there.) It would be hard to do justice to Nucky’s grand style and excess, or to the great—and depressing—American saga of Atlantic City, and “Boardwalk Empire” doesn’t meet the challenge. It’s a big production—the first episode alone cost nearly twenty million dollars—and it looks authentic in a way that, paradoxically, seems lifeless. You’re constantly aware that you’re watching a period piece, albeit one with some vivid scenes and interesting details.
There are a surprising number of echoes—in casting, in plot lines, in certain shots—of past work by the same people. Watching the first episode, viewers can’t help being reminded of that “Sopranos” episode set in the Pine Barrens—which Winter wrote—because it, too, is set there, and involves two characters who screw up in a way that leads to sudden, frightening violence. Instead of Christopher and Paulie, here we have Jimmy Darmody (Michael Pitt), a fictional character who’s Thompson’s protégé, and Al Capone (Stephen Graham), at this point just a short fellow on the lowest rung of the crime ladder, who is eager to climb up. They pull a fast one on some bagmen working for the New York gangster Arnold Rothstein, setting them up for a robbery, but the scene becomes chaotic when Capone is spooked by a deer in the woods and starts shooting, killing several men. When Jimmy berates him, he gets defensive. It was “the fuckin’ deers!” he says. Scorsese directed this episode, and he throws a lot of punch into it, with scenes that aren’t related but which establish the interconnectedness of every aspect of life in Atlantic City—politics, gambling, bootlegging, prostitution, drinking—but some of his direction seems almost an homage to himself. There’s a scene involving a guy being taken out on a boat, beaten, and dumped into the ocean—shades of Big Pussy in “The Sopranos.” In the fifth episode, a woman who has come to believe that Nucky has feelings for her brings him a gift of Irish soda bread she has baked; busy, he brushes her off. She walks away, and we see a closeup of a garbage can as the bread is dumped into it. This, of course, recalls the famous scene in “The Sopranos” where Edie Falco’s Carmela takes a pan of baked ziti to her local priest, Father Phil, who has allowed her to develop a crush on him. It dawns on her that she’s not the only woman feeding Father Phil’s ego with homemade goodies and, crestfallen, she throws the ziti away, pan and all. Here I had to laugh at my own attachment to certain scenes in “The Sopranos”; characters in other shows are sometimes going to throw food away, and I need to let them. It’s hard, though, when the imitation lacks the brilliance of the original. And, Mr. Winter, did you really have to cast Tom Aldredge, the actor who played Carmela’s father, as Nucky’s father?
Buscemi is not an obvious choice to play the central figure of a drama, especially the drama of a man who ran Atlantic City for thirty years. The real Nucky was six feet four and physically substantial, and he appears not to have felt conflicted in any way about his life style. Buscemi can’t play that kind of character; even at the age of fifty-two, he looks cagey and restless—not like a guy at the top but like the guy who gets killed when he tries to knock off the guy at the top. What Buscemi has is a silent-movie charisma, with his big eyes and his expressive face, which betrays depths of doubt and regret. Yet here his face is hard to read, except in the rare moments when Nucky’s alone. Walking down the boardwalk, he peers into shop windows, standing for a long time in front of a place that displays incubators, with real premature babies in them. As he watches a nurse carefully tending to a baby, while “Some of These Days” plays on the soundtrack, he exudes a powerful sense of need—you half expect him to go in and try to buy a newborn. Nucky lost his wife seven years ago, we learn a little later; not a day goes by that he doesn’t think of her, he tells someone. The real Nucky also lost his wife early in their marriage and was devastated, but apparently he didn’t go mooning about by himself; instead, he partied heartily.
In the sixth episode, Nucky issues a warning to Lucky Luciano: it’s “my ocean,” he says. “Everything you see here, it’s mine.” I was reminded of the aging small-time gangster’s helper played by Burt Lancaster in Louis Malle’s 1980 movie “Atlantic City.” On the boardwalk, where abandoned buildings are being razed so that casinos can be built, the old guy says to a young punk, “The Atlantic Ocean was something then,” and “You should have seen the Atlantic Ocean in those days.” His reverie of Atlantic City is, in a way, closer to reality than “Boardwalk Empire” ’s reality is. Atlantic City wasn’t as violent a place as it appears in this series; it embodied the promise (and the disappointments) of good times.
The real center of the show lies in the stories of the strivers and questers around Nucky: Margaret Schroeder (Kelly Macdonald), an Irish immigrant whose husband beats her and who appeals to Nucky to help find him a job; Jimmy Darmody, who studied at Princeton briefly before going off to war, and is confounded by his discovery that it’s possible to learn to kill and not care about it; and Nelson Van Alden (Michael Shannon), a fearsome federal agent who’s on a crusade to stop booze smuggling and is hiding a shameful secret of his own. But these characters’ stories are interesting more for what they tell us about the time than for the performances. “Boardwalk Empire” is at great pains to give viewers a sense that they are there, and yet rarely did I feel engrossed in the show. Even if its point is to show you the ugly side of fun, “Boardwalk Empire” should be much more fun to watch. ♦
