![]() ![]() ![]() If you liked this kind of stuff, boy howdy, appointment viewing. Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, and Arnold Rothstein, all of whom appeared in the opening episode, were just the tip of the iceberg in terms of major historical gangland figures who took on major roles in the show, making it a mafia buff’s dream. Scorsese directed the pilot, giving its gangster goings-on an even more unbeatable pedigree. Both its creator, Terence Winter, and star, Steve Buscemi, worked on no less a mob masterpiece than The Sopranos. Throw in the smash success of Breaking Bad, the era’s other major crime drama beginning with a B, and it was all Boardwalk could do to hold its head above critical and commercial water.Īnd certainly, the show’s initial appeal lied in its familiarity, perhaps to a fault. Memories of Deadwood and The Wire - two series about the intersection of community and crime, which with The Sopranos comprised HBO’s holy trinity - lingered. In its Zeitgeist-tapping revisionist fantasy Game of Thrones, HBO itself produced an even more sprawling, more violent, more expensive drama about the sins of people in power against which Boardwalk was forced to compete for attention. ![]() It also faced an apples-to-apples matchup with fellow Sopranos alum Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men, a contemporaneously running period prestige drama about bad men in beautiful suits. As the successor to HBO’s revolutionary first mafia series, The Sopranos - on which Winter was a prominent writer - it was always doomed to comparisons with that incomparable show. It’s not hard to understand how Boardwalk Empire lost the war for control of the prestige-drama trade. As a visual, aural, and, most important, moral experience, Boardwalk Empire is the Golden Age of TV Drama’s hidden treasure. “As the prestige drama meant to replace The Sopranos,” she continues, “it only ever filled its time slot.” Former Grantlander Andy Greenwald, a Boardwalk skeptic of long standing, dismissed the start of its final season: “It’s a show built around a hero with nothing much to do living in a town in which nothing much happens.”īut if you give Boardwalk another spin before pressing play on its successor, you may find these analyses don’t stand up to repeated listening. “ Boardwalk lasted for five seasons, but it never did more than yeoman’s work,” writes Slate’s Willa Paskin in her review of Vinyl. But in terms of audience size, critical acclaim, and pop-culture cachet, the Empire was, to many, a crumbling one. Creator Terence Winter, producer-director Martin Scorsese, and star Bobby Cannavale are all veterans of a single show: Boardwalk Empire, Winter’s five-season exploration of Prohibition-era Atlantic City and the gangsters - some factual, some fictional, some fictionalized - who fought for its control. They’re getting the band back together, man! When Vinyl, HBO’s new series about the music scene in 1970s New York City, debuts this Sunday, it will effectively double as a reunion tour. Steve Buscemi in particular was criticized for his portrayal of the Big Man Antihero. ![]()
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