THE DEUCE with David Simon, George Pelecanos, James Franco AND James Franco

Guess we might as well have a thread for this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2pXEzIQnUs

bet HBO are really regretting their investment after the Vinyl debacle

HBO Drops Another Deuce

Long preview article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/24/arts/television/the-deuce-hbo-david-simon.html

James Franco, who directed two of the first season’s episodes, assumes double acting duty as well. He plays Vincent Martino, an ambitious bartender based on the man who had spun enticing tales of the Deuce, and his twin, Frankie, who shares none of his brother’s reservations about working in the sex trade for the mob.

Does the "actor playing two roles" thing *ever* work out to be better than more than tolerable?
Just get another actor!

And Franco is so annoyingly smug all the time. Ugh, not sure about this

In the future, TV and movie viewers will be able to swap out actors at will for anyone in the canon.

Does the "actor playing two roles" thing *ever* work out to be better than more than tolerable?

Jeffrey Jambor in Arrested Development & Nicholas Cage in Adaptation

but yes, it's almost always a bad idea

Twin peaks is doing well atm

oh yeah lol

I am cautiously optimistic about this tbh

but I also loved most of Treme so

Otm

first episode is streaming now fyi

*on hbo go that is

they point out that the franco thing is a "based on a real life" thing but man i don't wanna see franco doing the patti duke

The patti what

it's a reference to patty duke's most famous role

In 2015, Duke made her final TV appearance, guest-starring as Grandma Janice and Great-aunt Hilary, a pair of identical twins, on "Liv and Maddie."

and Οὖτις's post was a reference to

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgdisnVQf6A

renewed for a second season

if i ever watch it wd be for Maggie Gyllenhaal

Does the "actor playing two roles" thing *ever* work out to be better than more than tolerable?

uhhh, Jeremy Irons for Cronenberg? and the Hammer dude in the Facebook movie, on a more mortal level.

Fargo Season 3 has double the Ewan MacGregor, he's good as them.

Morbius OTM was waiting for Dead Ringers...

Keaton in Multiplicity is p funny

This is really good so far. Feels nice and authentic without the "people playing '70s dressup" vibe of most recent films and tv things set in that decade ( yeah, "Vinyl", I'm looking at you). Cast is excellent.

didn't hate ep one but also not watching anymore of this

a recommended old VV story on that milieu, "Deep Peep"

https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=KEtq3P1Vf8oC&dat=19780501&printsec=frontpage&hl=en

I just learned that Margareta Levieva, who plays Abby the NYU dropout on this show, is 37 years old. Her character is supposed to be what, 19? I never would have guessed.

woah

*Margarita

i think the latest episode was the first really good one. all of the separate pieces that have been slowly developing - the cops, the mafia, prostitutes and pimps, porno, the francos - are starting to intertwine and it's really satisfying. not unlike, for obvious reasons, the wire.

anyone else watching this? i am trying to break myself out of the habit of calling it "the douche, starring james franco AND james franco as the douche"

didn't hate ep one but also not watching anymore of this

i felt the same way, btw, after watching the first couple. there was almost something exhausting about gearing up for more "prestige television". i know that doesn't make any sense. i suppose i should hold off on expressing any more enthusiasm until there are at least a few really really good episodes in a row, but i'm much more optimistic about that happening than i was at the beginning. there's a lot going on, so now i can see why they took the time to build up the world.

there was almost something exhausting about gearing up for more "prestige television". i know that doesn't make any sense.

literally could not make any more sense

haha, well that's nice to hear. i mean, i hear things of that nature from my friends, too. but i'm not sure why i feel that way! "dang it, here's another really well produced serial tv/film, basically, which will bring my enjoyment for the next 2 to 6 years." maybe it's just the exhaustion of knowing that i might be expected to know what's going on with this show, in certain circles, and that if i don't know, i will feel left out?

I'm watching it, it's solid in that particularly un-showy David Simon way where things happen and then some more things happen. Amazingly I don't think very much about James Franco being James Franco, which means this is probably his best role(s)?

And it is driving me insane that for some reason Black Thought is credited as "Tarik Trotter" when everything else he's done has been "Tariq Trotter". Why???

Amazingly I don't think very much about James Franco being James Franco

yeah, i actually don't mind franco but for some reason i really enjoy making fun of james franco, so i'm probably going to keep doing it. speaking of, check out this cool screen capture from imdb's website this morning:

https://i.imgur.com/9ZfjOnf.png

I like this but it's so slow. Feel like Maggie G had been about to join films for 6 eps now.

HBO’s new ensemble drama “The Deuce” is, among other things, an unflinching show about the sex work industry in 1970s New York. But its most intimate exchange to date takes place in a moment of postcoital vulnerability between lovers. A bedside radio plays the Four Tops’ Motown hit “Baby I Need Your Loving” as Vincent Martino (James Franco), a thirtysomething bar proprietor, and his college-dropout bartender, Abby Parker (Margarita Levieva), lie in each other’s arms. “Do you like this music?” he asks, and her condescending laugh says it all. When he presses her about what she listens to, Abby turns the radio’s dial until she hears “Pale Blue Eyes” by the Velvet Underground. When she starts to tell a story about seeing the band at Max’s Kansas City, Vincent shushes her: “I’m listening.”

rmde

That scene was not so good. It did make me wonder whether VU ever got any radio play, even locally in New York.

yeah that particular kind of um fictional license really leaps out I mean wtf

Yeah that was my least favorite scene in the show so far. Very Treme-era Simon.

I saw five minutes of this show. Might have been the first episode, or the fifth, who knows. Seemed ... nothing special, but it did at least look right.

God I’m sorry they played a band inaccurately on the radio how did you not shut off the show then and there.

I never even turned it on, problem solved

I'm agnostic on The Wire but this is decent. Paradoxically, its leisurely pace makes me think there needs to be more of it to be effective.

started watching the first ep and am reserving judgment til I'm through w it but my first thought was what's up with all the blaxploitation tropes and zero mafia guys.

also lol @ Method Man in a wig

the mafia guys are present

I liked the pilot of this but have yet to watch more. tbh I really liked Treme, esp the 2nd and 3rd seasons

This is better than Vinyl

low bar

maybe the lowest bar

This is better than Vinyl

So is putting out a lit match in your eye.

It's kinda refreshing that having two Francos basically serves no purpose, I'm glad that after the first episode there haven't been any plot mechanics that hinge on mistaken twin identity etc.

another great episode, i thought. i was a bit confused with the conversation between Alston (the cop) and the new captain. the captain acknowledges that NYPD discriminates against black cops, and brings it up in a way that suggests that he's sympathetic to changing things. but then he makes a distinction between "meateaters" and "grasseaters" - meateaters being people who cause problems for the department and grasseaters being people who keep their head down. and then he presses Alston on that, to make sure that he's a grasseater. maybe there's no confusion there, i guess it's just laying bare the weird motivations of the captain, in that he recognizes the prejudices of the police and his own privilege but he's still dedicated to maintaining the status quo?

I thought he was saying that they were going to be rooting out corruption in the police force -- the meateaters who were seriously on the take and connected to the politicians/mafia, and that the grasseaters were benign but would still "have to change their ways".

see, i thought i picked up on that too but then this vulture recap made me think maybe i was misunderstanding everything?

He also gives the new captain, McDonagh (Ed Moran), a tour of the Deuce, and his uneasiness at the new assignment only compounds when McDonagh pointedly asks him if he’s a “meat eater” or a “grass eater,” i.e. someone who stirs up shit or someone who grazes and does what he needs to do to get by. Alston has always been caught between a rock and a hard place, between trying to atone for his part in corruption and playing a part in it. Now, it’s going to get worse.

it was sort of ambiguous. it's like, was the captain testing alston's resolve to root out corruption or pressuring him to not say anything about it?

I think Jordan is right and the Vulture recap has it wrong.

I really think it's the former!

xp

I've not seen beyond ep 1 of this, but am shocked that there is any ambiguity at all in a David Simon series.

that's just silly

If I couldn't finish Treme or Show Me A Hero, would I get much out of this?

I think it's much more engaging and more Wire-like than Treme (which I only stuck with out of familiarity with the subject matter). Didn't see SMAH.

SMAH did nothing for me tbh

so, this is actually really good

I esp appreciate that for a show about fucking/prostitution/pornography, the nudity and sex is never titillating. Everything is grimy and kinda gross, occasionally scary.

mostly enjoying the cast, Franco is serviceable (getting serious Matt Dillon vibes from Bad Franco), Gyllenhaal is great, the guy who runs the porn store is *perfect*, Jackie Aprile redux is good.

and I haven't gotten to the terrible-sounding scene referenced upthread yet, but in general I am really enjoying how music is used in this - I am blanking on the film term for when all the music heard is what characters are listening to, but I dig that a lot. Cutting between two scenes where two different sets of characters are listening to the same thing on the radio, but not in an obtrusive or showy way. Or Franco laughing at himself dancing to "Mr. Big Stuff" on the jukebox. This show is a slow burn, and grim and committed to the visual and unrelenting ugliness of the area, but I am into it so far.

diagetic

ah! yes ty

this is my new favorite show

(Starcade is my new old favorite show)

The "Pale Blue Eyes" on the radio scene turned out to be an oddly a rare misstep. the cast in this is so good, and Franco delivers the lolz at least once an episode, like when the guy is sketching out the porno-booths and Rudy the Gangster takes one look and says "oh yeah, I get it" and then Franco adds "so they can jerk off!" classic. Method Man also surprisingly good, his extended dialogue trying to pickup Gyllenhaal on the street was so good.

Franco-as-Vinnie reminds me of Daniel Desario at times (his character on Freaks and Geeks eighteen years ago, for any of you lucky enough to have your first viewing of that wonderful show still in your future).

Wait, sorry, I meant Franco as Frankie, the irresponsible one.

speaking of Freaks and Geeks alum I was just marveling at Neil's older brother's transformation into porno-director-schlub, he is so good in this

he looks like he's had a rough 18 years lol

Krumholtz is an undervalued (or poorly served) actor

he is great in this, yeah

Christ u r right, he's been in a lot of crap

really thought this was great

man even the season finale was comparatively low-key. I'm starting to realize which plotlines I find engaging (Candy's, primarily, and the gangster racket) and the ones I don't care about at all (the pimps). Franco's storylines aren't all that engaging but he is v fun to watch so he makes up for it. The cop/journalist story is okay but it seems kind of obvious where it's going.

I definitely do not ever need to see another season-ending montage of all the characters set to an iconic piece of music, that shit is so lazy at this point.

old man yelling at the clouds: wtf is curtis cranked so fucking LOUD in the theme song? it's like 3x the volume of the rest of the show! i'm already watching it, so i don't know understand why it's trying to grab my attention so hard

haha yeah I noticed that too. Great song and all but...

the pimp storylines are so weird in tone - like, am I really supposed to care about the existential struggles of some of the worst people alive? like, oh no suddenly they feel unnecessary, what are they going to do?! and, why, this other pimp, he has *feelings*! How ever will they grow and evolve? Method Man at least knows to keep it alternately funny or scary... but idgaf about any of them, they could all be murdered like Reggie Love and my reaction would be "huh, well that was well-deserved".

fwiw the second season is meant to be set five years later

so we might not see any direct resolution to a lot of the stories set up this season

whoah waht?!

I liked that this season all basically led up to the release of Deep Throat, skipping ahead to '76 is an interesting decision

David Simon has a three-season plan for this series. Is that something you’re game for?

FRANCO: Of course! I had to be, signing on. One of the interesting things about this show is that it’s a hybrid between a limited series and a regular series. There are only eight episodes a season, and if we go, which it looks like we will, there will only be three seasons. It gives it this perfectly encapsulated, very concise, economical power punch feeling to it. From the beginning, the plan was to cover 14 years. The first season is ‘71-‘72, and the dawn of pornography. The second season is ‘77, ‘78 and ‘79, or somewhere in there. And then, the third season will be ‘84-‘85 when everything imploded and the old 42nd Street was shut down by Mayor Koch. I think if we pull it off, it will be a really nice encapsulation of a time and a place.

late 70s is kind of the "golden era" of pretentious feature-length porn films. (No idea what that means in terms of 42nd St in particular)

Wow, I had no idea about the three season plan! Fantastic. I love this idea.

This was great! I'm wondering if Simon needs a good collaborator to make a good (mini-)series (Ed Burns, Richard Wright).

I had a omg moment when I saw that B'Elanna Torres directed an episode!

Also, if the brothers weren't identical, Ziggy would've been perfect to play Frankie.

Oh my gosh you're right, I knew he reminded me of someone

Just binged the whole thing this weekend

So much better than I expected. Loved the way the women all feel like real characters, the way the hookers interacted with each other etc was a huge selling point for me, and Maggie G killed it, so great.

Ruby tho ;_;
I screamed when that john pushed her out the window.

Pelecanos said in the behind the scenes clip that Ruby was based on a real woman & she died exactly the same way.

I think the show did a good job of showing how much of their job is survival, how tough those girls have to be to live that life. Also the desperate shitty nature of pimps. etc.

And I loved that final reverse tracking shot of the Parlor hallway, shiny wallpaper & all but the noises are the same, it’s still basically another Lionel Hotel for the girls. Just another hallway.

also (sorry for multiposting)

totally did not clock Ralph Macchio at first l, had to look him up to work out who he played after i saw his name in the credits

i want a whole season just of Maggie’s character directing porn

Yeah that was def the most interesting plotline/characters imo

She just lit up the screen in every scene. Damn. I have always liked her but this felt like a new level

Some of the conversational riffing and background that's put into verbal exposition doesn't quite land. I was kind of left wondering, is anyone who's working on writing/production end of things actually gay?

It's a much more enjoyable show than I was expecting, especially the decision to make most of the season a slow burn.

Maggie G is a treat in this, for sure, and seeing her on the list of producers seems significant

i'm really excited to see where this goes next season, when the narrative leaps forward a few years. they did a good job developing the minor characters. guys like franco's brother in law, bobby, who ends the first season making a ton of money managing the sex parlor in cahoots with the mafia (and bizarro franco) - when the series resumes, will he be a full-time mafia guy, bossing around regular bartender franco? or will his life just be completely shattered already?

there are gay and trans writers on staff apparently

Feel like the death of Ruby was a case of the show pulling its punches, it would have been bleaker if it had been Ashley (a more tragic character than Ruby) who was killed. During the previous episode I was convinced CC was going to catch up with her and prevent her from getting on that bus to freedom.

xp ok then!

Loved the bit where Vincent asked the junior mafia guy, "I'm not a made man am I?"

Watched the first episode tonight--good start. Franco quite restrained. Lisa P!

hah, I only made that connection after the fact

This was better than I thought it'd be--very low-key, good performances all around, lots of room for a second season. My two favourite characters are Harvey Wasserman, the Ron Jeremy-like director ("Get in there, my son"), and Rudy the Mob Guy. I wonder if Maggie Gyllenhaal partly modeled the Candy half of her performance on Nancy Allen in Blow Out. I expected Franco to be in full-blown Scorsese overdrive the whole way, but he's very restrained, even as Frankie. Ruby's death was a sad ending. The music's kind of buried in the background, but I liked the Undisputed Truth and (surprise) the Guess Who.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlKU8POYQsk

pretty enjoyable premiere, I love a bunch of these characters (say, 2/3rds of them). And sometimes I like the use of the diagetic music/ppl listening to the same thing on the radio and other times I feel like whoever the music producer is is just fucking up left and right. Like, "This Year's Girl" as the opening music is very on-the-nose but I felt like it worked until for no apparent reason they overdubbed a woman's voice over certain lines? And then having "Cosmic Slop" and "Roadrunner" being played on the radio? what fucking radio station that pimps + pornstars listened to was doing that in 1977

otoh Barry White and whatever Moroder song that was in the gay disco were very well placed

lol nobody's watching this, are they

I am, but I'm watching season 1.

I didn't realize Megan Abbott was a writer and story editor on this; she's my friend's wife too, you'd think he'd more loudly socialize shit like this

also: this is really a great series. I echo everything poositive everyone said up above. when it was originally being touted it was very much along the lines of 'here's the start of the porn industry!" which is selling it short. It's about a lot more than that. I appreciate shows like this that give me a picture of what NYC was like at that time; the first time I went to NYC was 1997 by which time all of that had been completely cleaned up. It's hard for me to fathom a big chunk of a city even being like this these days.

I didn't know they were up and running again. I will definitely watch the second season, but I don't have HBO, so I'll have to wait for my bootleg DVD place to get it.

I'm still watching, but behind by a few weeks. Tough to watch this on the bus!

yeah it is *really* broad in scope. Almost too broad, I think. I'm generally enjoying it because it's so well shot and acted, and if I don't like one storyline hey don't worry in 5 minutes the show will be shift focus to somewhere else. But I think it does lack a certain dramatic tension, there's a distinct lack of real conflict. Everybody is made sympathetic in one way or another, there's no real villains, and no real stakes to anything - none of the characters really seem to be in opposition to one another, so what you get is just kind of a bunch of semi-interesting (and usually lurid) stuff happening. It ends up feeling oddly inert.

the one minor character I miss from season 1 was the porn store owner. that guy was just too perfectly cast.

xp

Been watching it ( missed this week's) and still loving the attention to detail. Some of the storylines are becoming yawnsome, though ( Gyllenhaal's (sp!) and the troublesome Franco "twin" especially). Love the cop stuff but I think I see where a lot of stuff is heading ( Maggie G's son prob inadvertently catching a porno starring mom / hooker porn starlet tries to leave pimp and trouble ensues/ etc etc). Girl who plays bar owner Franco's girlfriend should play Joan Jett in a biopic. Gorgeous.

Girl who plays bar owner Franco's girlfriend should play Joan Jett in a biopic. Gorgeous.

not gonna deny that she is v pretty but her character is so fucking annoying and unrealistic, that person did not exist in 1977.

What do you find annoying and unrealistic about the character?

"yeah it is *really* broad in scope. Almost too broad, I think. I'm generally enjoying it because it's so well shot and acted, and if I don't like one storyline hey don't worry in 5 minutes the show will be shift focus to somewhere else. But I think it does lack a certain dramatic tension, there's a distinct lack of real conflict. Everybody is made sympathetic in one way or another, there's no real villains, and no real stakes to anything - none of the characters really seem to be in opposition to one another, so what you get is just kind of a bunch of semi-interesting ... stuff happening. It ends up feeling oddly inert."

Haven't seen any of this yet, but sounds like Treme, which I watched a season plus of and eventually wandered away from. Hard to get excited about.

middle-class feminist studies girl drops out of college to dabble in sex-work activism also happens to have impeccable cutting edge taste in up-and-coming punk bands and happens to be a dead ringer for Joan Jett, I mean come on that is some v idealized hindsight-is-20/20 screenwriter nonsense

maybe if she was modeled on Andrea Dworkin I would buy it

xp

it was clear from the Wire that Simon (and I suppose Pellecanos?) like to show the moral grey areas that most real people live in and that that militates against having outsized evil villains, but I feel like the genuine uber-ugly levels of brutality that are deeply ingrained in being a pimp (or a mobster, or a corrupt cop) are overly obscured in this show - at least one of these types could be credibly expected to be a real monster, but that's not really how Rudy or CC or any of these types are written. This one wants to be an actor! This one's kinda nice sometimes! Rudy looks out for his guys! Stories without villains or at least some sense of struggle, of opposing forces, just tend to be less engaging, and this show is no exception.

I'm watching it too, and haven't seen this week either, but like most I'm sticking with it because it's well made and the actors are good rather than the plot which is all over the place and, as others have said, far too broad.

Larry is the standout character this season I think.

So many penises, it feels like.

Larry's on-set dick reveal + smile was by far the funniest moment of the season

The real villain of Simon's shows is the SYSTEM, man.

"dead ringer for Joan Jett"

is her hair black in season 2? I don't see the resemblance myself

how about Suzi Quatro

I'd say CC is unambiguously a bad guy

(i'm watching too, but don't have an awful lot to say about S2 so far. Just seems to be ticking along)

xpost Yeah her hair's black now she's booking punk and new wave bands for the bar.

I don't care at all about the other nightclub.

https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iur/?f=1&image_host=http%3A%2F%2Fc7.alamy.com%2Fcomp%2FG4TDDK%2Fsinger-suzi-quatro-heathrow-airport-london-G4TDDK.jpg&u=https://c7.alamy.com/comp/G4TDDK/singer-suzi-quatro-heathrow-airport-london-G4TDDK.jpg
https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fcdn1-www.comingsoon.net%2Fassets%2Fuploads%2F2018%2F09%2FThe-Deuce-S2E3-3.jpg&f=1

xp

Other xpost Nah, CC is going to turn into Iceberg Slim and be the hero of season 3.

I'd say CC is unambiguously a bad guy

I do think the bringing in CC's former bottom whore as Abby's activist partner has brought his shittiness into sharper focus

(lol @ Iceberg Slim, well-known good guy pimp! I guess he did ultimately renounce his wayward ways)

Good points, Shakey. I guess I'm just enjoying the ride but definitely there's a bunch of unrealistic crap worthy of whatever that awful Scorsese NYC A&R guy series was whose name I forgot. Though this is a much better sho, imho.

*show

Definitely more Suzi than Joan

that awful Scorsese NYC A&R guy series was whose name I forgot

VINYL! gawd that was so bad. also ref'd upthread lol

that steak order was confirmation that CC is 100% evil

tension def ramped up this episode. contradictions were heightened, one might say

was totally convinced that was David Proval playing the elder Martino in his one scene but apparently not...? That dude did look familiar though.

Armand Asante

No redemption for CC then.

My favourite new fact is that Blake Leyh wanted to use We Are All Prostitutes as the theme music for season 2 but David Simon wouldn't let him because he felt it was a bit too Do You See.

"let's go with 'This Year's Girl', it's much more subtle"

It's back, and it's 1985. They are giving us a version of the Jack Maple policing story. This show is great, but still feels pretty low-stakes.

so this is gonna be the "who is going to get AIDS?!" season eh

Yeah I guess :/

Sex, lies and videotape

"wolfpacks", AIDS, some anachronisms in the dialogue ( "run it back"? Who used that on the streets of NYC in '84?!) and a bit of a messy covering-all-bases feeling. Kind of a disappointing start.

Very much a "torn from today's headlines!!" vibe in the writing that felt facile. Let's see where they go. Still, the recreation of mid-80s NYC in the production- at least what I recall of it - is often uncanny.

it continues to look and sound incredible but it's kind of all over the place narratively

like, I can't keep either Franco character's personal relationships straight

Yeah and I'm finding them the least interesting characters at the moment.

lol yeah it's weird how they have this twin plot set-up and then basically do nothing with it, they might as well be two non-identical twins played by different actors

if this ends with "good" Franco getting whacked in a case of mistaken identity because the "bad" Franco crosses the mob I am going to rmde

lol

i could not follow what bad Franco brother aws up to in this episode at all. What was the deal with meeting the dude in the car? what was he selling? Why did he borrow that video equipment and make that video with the family? what was going on?

the thing in the car I could follow - he has a side hussle w the gangster underling that the mob boss/Jackie Jr (no I can't remember the actual character name) doesn't know about.

No idea what the family/video camera thing was about cuz I was like "wait, he still has a family? who are these people?"

his side hussle is alluded to later when the mob boss/Jackie Jr asks about his loyalty/that he would never cut him out of anything. So there's some obvious foreshadowing going on there.

hussle & flo

did they not subtly just put a dworkin character in here yikes

LOL after last season I was wondering how long it would be before she got namedropped!

Did anybody have Shay for HIV bingo?

show finally delivers what we'd all been waiting for: first Franco kissing himself, and then Franco playing a death scene w himself

I admit that for long stretches of this show I was befuddled by the Jackie Aprile guy's good-guy gangster routine. I was always expecting him to do a heel turn at some point. But now I see that I wanted it to be one way but it was really the other way. :(

Great episode this week. Candy's monologue was heartbreaking.

that was a liiiiiitle on the nose, but honestly what I liked most about it was Krumholtz's change in reaction from bored/looking at his watch at the beginning and then "oh shit I feel so ashamed" at the end (perhaps mirroring the audience, I suppose)

last couple eps have been very good tho. the one plotline idgaf about is the ex-pornstar and her estranged dad.

Lori is the only plot I'm still invested in tbh

so I wonder if we’re going to get a follow up on Larry or did his story just end w season 2 finale when Darlene dipped out?

(I haven’t seen the latest episode btw)

I don't think we're gonna see Larry again

they did (briefly) bring back my favorite minor character - the porn shop owner from S1

well that sure was grim. was that the end? where do any of these characters go from here?

Finale next week.

My guess is Vincent gets killed, Candy gives up her film rather than do the deal offered by Lori's manager (after what happens at the end of this week's ep) and the brothel shuts down as NYC cleans up/gentrifies.

Who else has a story to resolve?

I think the final episode has to be somewhat of a constructive, if depressing, coda after this one. Or at least one with actual destruction of part of the neighborhood and new, sleek high-rises going up. Abby's speech was the writers speaking to the audience, and it almost felt set up enough to not be clunky. Well, not incredibly clunky.

Abby is the worst major written character on this by some distance, that speech was terrible. "I'm a bartender, I served the damned and the damnable" yeah that's a thing bartenders say...

well she's supposed to be an intellectual who just happens to be a bartender but yeah.

this last episode was incredibly depressing, I was shocked by Lori's end even though it was obviously coming.

I can't say I saw either of these recent violent deaths coming (although I should have) but the shocks felt kind of cheap in how grim and manipulative they were. not the first time in this series by any stretch, but just the sort of ruthless dispatching of sympathetic characters - it's harsh.

the thing with Abby is that she's such a *writer's* character, she feels more like a construct than a person. Like they needed a character to serve as an intersection for all these other ideas (feminism, anti-porn crusaders, a moral conscience for Franco, academia, the artsier side of 70s/80s NY) but they never bothered to give her any kind of lived experience or motivation that makes sense, she's just this collection of signifiers. Like they *really* wanted to get Dworkin and McKinnon in there and then worked back from there to a character that would tie them in.

agreed

I feel like there are a lot of threads they wanted to tackle and may have had a full series outline but a lot of characters got short-changed, or they got notes that viewers might not get why the gentrification was bad outside of the forced nature and shady dealing, so they just explicitly threw in some monologues

Abby's character seemed to have a bit more potential but hasn't done much other than speechify or be a window into the art/political scene for a while

Franco and Gyllenhaal having production credits didn't hurt their characters' screen time

finale was going well and suddenly we hit a flash forward to 2019 and I paused to post here with

OH NOOOOOO

why?

well, I get why, having seen some twitter douche unironicly posing a picture of a relatively clean 70s street with a theater showing foreign films ensconced with porn theaters and sex parlors juxtaposed with the modern corporate times square as an ideal

it’s a different draw with different sins and rules, and we’ve conflated supposed crimes of morality and decency with violence and exploitation, without realizing you can police the latter without jumping on a high horse and excising the former. and, as they hammered in with the field trip to the bronx, you can’t really excise

way to reach out and bludgeon the latter day time square tourist hbo viewers, though

i thought it was ok other than his terrible makeup. Abby walking through at the very end was a good touch.

minor takeaway from this series : Black Frankie = style icon

otm about Abby

as someone who is a contemporary, I thought this reminiscence of '70s Times Square by Tim Sommer was p accurate

https://observer.com/2017/11/more-than-the-deuce-a-recollection-of-times-square-in-1979/

just remembered I never bothered to watch the last episode of this lol

sleazy is not what I’d call it.

Followed immediately by:

Yes, the sheer density of porn culture and commerce was extraordinary (even the most lurid panoramas don’t do it justice), but that’s not my strongest memory of the area. What I remember most is the noise: the constant babble of the drug peddlers, hookers and three-card monte dealers, the rhythmic hollers of people selling shoe shines and salvation and hot dogs, the constant click and clack and cough of the barkers trying to get you into their strip bars and massage parlors.

Sounds pretty ... sleazy? I mean, if he's going to cite big boobed clickbait on the internet as sleazy, then, yeah, what he describes is at least that.

nostalgia = sleaze + time

heh

the last episode is really good

I was hoping this thread would remind me whether I watched S2 or not--I think I did, but I'm not 100% sure. I'll check a couple of episode summaries. Took S2/S3 out of the library; will finish up one way or the other.

this series was really underappreciated