In the most recent episode of HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire,” a crew of upstart gangsters assemble in the carved wood- and dead-animal-adorned confines of a local power broker’s mansion to talk business. On any other show, this would be a climactic moment. Over the past year-and-a-half, we’ve watched these men move up the ladder from henchmen to independent operators who have begun, inevitably, to plot against their former and current superiors. Their meeting is the flower of this evolution.
But “Boardwalk Empire” doesn’t go in much for significant moments. The council scene takes place within the first 10 minutes of the episode, and doesn’t go well. Jimmy Darmody, the former Princeton student and World War I veteran played by Michael Pitt, has called his criminal counterparts from New York and Chicago to Atlantic City to hear about his plans for removing his former mentor, the political boss Nucky Thompson (Steve Buscemi), from power. Nucky, Jimmy says, will go to jail on election-rigging charges. The gangsters in the room will fill the void.
These men are used to a harder justice — murder, not politics, is their method. Thompson should be dead, not in a jail cell, and Al Capone (Stephen Graham), the Chicago delegate, says as much to Jimmy. “Look, your thing with him, the political what-a-you-call,” Capone says. “I don’t see the angle.”
Critics and viewers having been saying much the same thing about “Boardwalk Empire” since its 2010 debut, which drew 4.81 million viewers (the show’s numbers have been steady between 2.5 million and 3 million this season). The channel’s oft-maligned flagship drama, created by “The Sopranos” veteran Terence Winter and now in its second season, has already been renewed for a third season, but its ratings have declined since the show’s premiere. In a landscape dense with weekly recaps and treatises on the importance of similar dramas like AMC’s “Breaking Bad” and “Mad Men,” only tepid attention has been paid to “Boardwalk,” despite its prized Sunday night spot on HBO’s lineup.
The consensus indictment of the show has been unwavering: It’s a well-acted and slickly-directed period drama with high production values and no big idea. If you happen to be interested in the minutiae of jazz-age, Prohibition-era Atlantic City, with its bevies of flappers, bootleggers, and Klansmen, this is the show for you; if not, perhaps you’d be better served by “Mad Men,” another period drama where the stakes tend to be higher, and the themes — identity, ambition, class — skew broader and more universal.
It is true that not much happens on “Boardwalk.” Or rather, plenty happens, but all the action takes place at the same bemused pitch — whether depicting infidelities, spectacular murder, or low-level political jockeying for favors and influence, the show just plays breezily on. In this sense, “Boardwalk” feels less like an important show and more like an artful diversion, full of small delights — the clean razor lines of Michael Pitt’s haircut, now migrating to the subways of 2011 Brooklyn; the parade of lavish and complicated Prohibition-era suits that Buscemi sports; and the sheer number of characters in play — some based on historical figures and some entirely fictional — almost all of whom manage to steal a scene or two.
The second season, now just over halfway finished, has been darker and more melancholy than the first. The show’s initial run seemed to take place in sunshine and among people — Buscemi’s Thompson spoke wittily at rallies against alcohol or for voting rights for women by day, then cavorted with drunken sycophants and naked women by night. But in this new season, he’s been driven indoors. Darmody and his father, Commodore Louis Kaestner (Dabney Coleman), have taken control of many of the town’s levers, including the Coast Guard, impairing Thompson’s ability to import illegal liquor. Thompson’s former ward bosses have defected in droves; at times, he’s had little more than his ambivalent girlfriend Margaret Schroeder (Kelly Macdonald) and a borrowed killer from Ireland, Owen Sleater (Charlie Cox), on his side. And all the while, federal charges loom, threatening to send him to prison.
Buscemi is an unconventional lead by any metric; though he’s a talented actor, his strengths do not include charisma, which makes the show’s focus on Thompson feel self-defeating at times. One character calls Thompson “petty and resentful,” which is exactly right. He’s Tony Soprano without charm — maudlin and self-pitying and without any redeeming sense of presence. To make up for this fact, the series’ writers have gradually elevated Michael Pitt’s Jimmy Darmody to something like a co-lead. But though Pitt is better at seduction than Buscemi, his character hasn’t been allowed to grow enough — Darmody’s struggle to choose between the Commodore, his father, and Thompson, the man who effectively raised him, has become exasperating. You want him to make up his mind and allow us to move on.
But “Boardwalk Empire” is really an ensemble show, and the best work here is being done at the margins. The series’ coterie of rising gangsters — Stephen Graham’s Al Capone, Lucky Luciano (Vincent Piazza), Meyer Lansky (Anatol Yusef) — are a bunch of wisecracking maniacs who chatter over one another and affect outlandish period accents. Richard Harrow (Jack Huston), Darmody’s tin-mask-wearing fellow veteran and henchman, is the show’s conscience and most likeable character: his recent suicidal Memorial Day sojourn in the New Jersey woods is the closest “Boardwalk Empire” has come to the alchemical mix of comedy and existential angst that made “The Sopranos” so indelible.
Chalky White (Michael Kenneth Williams), the show’s African-American community leader and bootlegger, has spent a frustrating amount of this season offscreen, but his storyline has also been among the show’s most compelling. One early episode found White stuck in a jail cell with a book he can’t read (due to a lack of literacy he can’t admit to his fellow inmates) and a menacing cellmate. Undaunted, White proceeds to demonstrate all the different kinds of power a man can yield — and all the different kinds of dignity a human can maintain — even while trapped in a box.
These are perhaps mild pleasures, but they are pleasures nonetheless. In many ways, “Boardwalk Empire” is an anomaly in the current television landscape, where dramas like “Breaking Bad” have been hailed for their unrelenting and unhappy realism. “Breaking Bad” is indeed ambitious, but it’s also hard to watch, so cranked up are the tensions, the conflicts between characters, the life-and-death stakes. In contrast, “Boardwalk” is a show without much in the way of stakes at all: It’s about exactly what it purports to be about. Viewers conditioned to look for the churn of ideas in the background will find only foreground; it’s a still life, a pleasant way to pass an hour and no more. It will not stop your heart. But it will keep you watching in calm, comfort, and style.
But “Boardwalk Empire” doesn’t go in much for significant moments. The council scene takes place within the first 10 minutes of the episode, and doesn’t go well. Jimmy Darmody, the former Princeton student and World War I veteran played by Michael Pitt, has called his criminal counterparts from New York and Chicago to Atlantic City to hear about his plans for removing his former mentor, the political boss Nucky Thompson (Steve Buscemi), from power. Nucky, Jimmy says, will go to jail on election-rigging charges. The gangsters in the room will fill the void.
These men are used to a harder justice — murder, not politics, is their method. Thompson should be dead, not in a jail cell, and Al Capone (Stephen Graham), the Chicago delegate, says as much to Jimmy. “Look, your thing with him, the political what-a-you-call,” Capone says. “I don’t see the angle.”
Critics and viewers having been saying much the same thing about “Boardwalk Empire” since its 2010 debut, which drew 4.81 million viewers (the show’s numbers have been steady between 2.5 million and 3 million this season). The channel’s oft-maligned flagship drama, created by “The Sopranos” veteran Terence Winter and now in its second season, has already been renewed for a third season, but its ratings have declined since the show’s premiere. In a landscape dense with weekly recaps and treatises on the importance of similar dramas like AMC’s “Breaking Bad” and “Mad Men,” only tepid attention has been paid to “Boardwalk,” despite its prized Sunday night spot on HBO’s lineup.
The consensus indictment of the show has been unwavering: It’s a well-acted and slickly-directed period drama with high production values and no big idea. If you happen to be interested in the minutiae of jazz-age, Prohibition-era Atlantic City, with its bevies of flappers, bootleggers, and Klansmen, this is the show for you; if not, perhaps you’d be better served by “Mad Men,” another period drama where the stakes tend to be higher, and the themes — identity, ambition, class — skew broader and more universal.
It is true that not much happens on “Boardwalk.” Or rather, plenty happens, but all the action takes place at the same bemused pitch — whether depicting infidelities, spectacular murder, or low-level political jockeying for favors and influence, the show just plays breezily on. In this sense, “Boardwalk” feels less like an important show and more like an artful diversion, full of small delights — the clean razor lines of Michael Pitt’s haircut, now migrating to the subways of 2011 Brooklyn; the parade of lavish and complicated Prohibition-era suits that Buscemi sports; and the sheer number of characters in play — some based on historical figures and some entirely fictional — almost all of whom manage to steal a scene or two.
The second season, now just over halfway finished, has been darker and more melancholy than the first. The show’s initial run seemed to take place in sunshine and among people — Buscemi’s Thompson spoke wittily at rallies against alcohol or for voting rights for women by day, then cavorted with drunken sycophants and naked women by night. But in this new season, he’s been driven indoors. Darmody and his father, Commodore Louis Kaestner (Dabney Coleman), have taken control of many of the town’s levers, including the Coast Guard, impairing Thompson’s ability to import illegal liquor. Thompson’s former ward bosses have defected in droves; at times, he’s had little more than his ambivalent girlfriend Margaret Schroeder (Kelly Macdonald) and a borrowed killer from Ireland, Owen Sleater (Charlie Cox), on his side. And all the while, federal charges loom, threatening to send him to prison.
Buscemi is an unconventional lead by any metric; though he’s a talented actor, his strengths do not include charisma, which makes the show’s focus on Thompson feel self-defeating at times. One character calls Thompson “petty and resentful,” which is exactly right. He’s Tony Soprano without charm — maudlin and self-pitying and without any redeeming sense of presence. To make up for this fact, the series’ writers have gradually elevated Michael Pitt’s Jimmy Darmody to something like a co-lead. But though Pitt is better at seduction than Buscemi, his character hasn’t been allowed to grow enough — Darmody’s struggle to choose between the Commodore, his father, and Thompson, the man who effectively raised him, has become exasperating. You want him to make up his mind and allow us to move on.
But “Boardwalk Empire” is really an ensemble show, and the best work here is being done at the margins. The series’ coterie of rising gangsters — Stephen Graham’s Al Capone, Lucky Luciano (Vincent Piazza), Meyer Lansky (Anatol Yusef) — are a bunch of wisecracking maniacs who chatter over one another and affect outlandish period accents. Richard Harrow (Jack Huston), Darmody’s tin-mask-wearing fellow veteran and henchman, is the show’s conscience and most likeable character: his recent suicidal Memorial Day sojourn in the New Jersey woods is the closest “Boardwalk Empire” has come to the alchemical mix of comedy and existential angst that made “The Sopranos” so indelible.
Chalky White (Michael Kenneth Williams), the show’s African-American community leader and bootlegger, has spent a frustrating amount of this season offscreen, but his storyline has also been among the show’s most compelling. One early episode found White stuck in a jail cell with a book he can’t read (due to a lack of literacy he can’t admit to his fellow inmates) and a menacing cellmate. Undaunted, White proceeds to demonstrate all the different kinds of power a man can yield — and all the different kinds of dignity a human can maintain — even while trapped in a box.
These are perhaps mild pleasures, but they are pleasures nonetheless. In many ways, “Boardwalk Empire” is an anomaly in the current television landscape, where dramas like “Breaking Bad” have been hailed for their unrelenting and unhappy realism. “Breaking Bad” is indeed ambitious, but it’s also hard to watch, so cranked up are the tensions, the conflicts between characters, the life-and-death stakes. In contrast, “Boardwalk” is a show without much in the way of stakes at all: It’s about exactly what it purports to be about. Viewers conditioned to look for the churn of ideas in the background will find only foreground; it’s a still life, a pleasant way to pass an hour and no more. It will not stop your heart. But it will keep you watching in calm, comfort, and style.
