Boardwalk Empire (2010-2014) Review
9/10
Five seasons on the business of illegal alcohol, beginning the night Prohibition starts in January 1920 and ending in 1931. The first three of those seasons are as good as television has been.
I’d put them in a top ten of any visual media, film included. What happens after them is a separate discussion and not a happy one.
Terence Winter wrote it, having come off The Sopranos, and Scorsese directed the pilot at a reported cost of around eighteen million dollars. That was the most expensive hour HBO had made.
The 9 is for seasons one to three and I’m not averaging it down for what followed. Those years have the best ensemble on television, a period rendered as a working economy instead of a backdrop, and a run of episodes in the second and third seasons I’d put against anything. The last two seasons are a different and much worse show wearing the same title.
What the First Three Seasons Get Right
The ensemble. Jimmy Darmody, Richard Harrow, Chalky White, Gillian, Nelson Van Alden, Arnold Rothstein, Margaret Schroeder, Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky. Every one of them wants something specific and incompatible with what the others want. That’s why the plot never feels imposed. Put any two of those characters in a room and conflict arrives automatically, because their goals can’t both be satisfied. The writers never have to invent a reason for anybody to clash.
The period is treated as a functioning economy instead of a costume. The shipping routes, the bribery schedules, the ward politics, the difference between a distillery and a cutting operation, the mechanics of moving alcohol from a boat in international waters into a glass in a nightclub. The ward politics in particular are excellent and almost never done well elsewhere. Nucky’s power comes from delivering votes, and the show spends real time on how a ward is delivered, which turns out to involve turkeys, funerals and threats in roughly equal measure. Gillian Darmody is the most disturbing creation in it. Gretchen Mol plays a woman who was trafficked as a child, has never been allowed to become an adult, and has done something to her son that the show reveals slowly and never sensationalizes. And Van Alden, played by Michael Shannon, is a Prohibition agent whose religious mania and sexual repression are so tightly wound that his eventual collapse is the most frightening thing in the first two seasons.
Shannon’s Van Alden is the character I’d have bet would turn into a cartoon, and he never does. I find him funnier and scarier than anybody else in the cast, sometimes in the same scene, and I think the writers deserve as much credit as Shannon for keeping his madness consistent.
Build an ensemble where the goals are mutually exclusive and you’ll never run short of scenes. The first three seasons never need a plot device because incompatibility is designed into the cast, and every meeting generates conflict without the writers arranging one.
The construction step is to write down what each character would consider a complete success and check that no two of them can both have it. Jimmy wants his father’s position. Nucky wants Jimmy to remain a subordinate. Chalky wants standing that Nucky benefits from denying him. Margaret wants respectability that depends on money she can’t morally accept. None of these can coexist.
The test on your own draft is to look at the last three scenes you wrote and ask what made the conflict happen. If the answer involves a coincidence, a misunderstanding or new information arriving, the incompatibility wasn’t deep enough. If the answer is that two people wanted the same job, the same person or the same territory, the story is generating itself and you can stop pushing.
Richard Harrow
A disfigured sniper with a hand-painted tin mask, almost no dialogue, and the most complete arc in the series. The mask forces everything into behavior. He can’t perform emotion with his face, so the writing has to establish who he is through what he does, and the show is disciplined enough to comply for four years. I think that discipline is the best writing decision in the whole series.
His scrapbook is the single best prop in the series. A collection of magazine cuttings showing an ordinary life he wants: a house, a dog, a woman, a dinner table. He explains it once, briefly, and never again. Jack Huston plays him with one eye and half a mouth and manages more range than most actors get with a full face. The relationship with Jimmy, and later with Julia and the boy, is the show’s only source of warmth.
His final sequence is the best thing in the series and among the best things television has done. He goes to do a job he doesn’t want, executes it competently, and dies under the boardwalk imagining the life from the scrapbook.
The show gives him no speech. He simply walks into a house that doesn’t exist, and the camera lets him have it.
The Chalky White Problem and What It Solved
Michael K. Williams plays a man running a parallel organization with parallel problems in a city where the arrangement is entirely segregated, and the show gives that structure real screen time instead of using it as background.
Chalky’s business is legitimate on paper and criminal in practice, exactly like Nucky’s, and his difficulty is that his standing depends on a white man’s goodwill in a way Nucky’s never does. He’s better at the job and permanently subordinate. The third season material with Dunn Purnsley and the Onyx Club is the strongest of it, because the show lets Chalky want something Nucky doesn’t control: a venue of his own with his name on it. What the show does well is refuse to make him admirable in a simple way. He kills people, he’s a hard father, and within his own community, people who think he’s accommodated too much contest his position. Where it fails him is later. Season four builds a good story around him and Valentin Narcisse, and season five has almost no idea what to do. That’s part of the general collapse.
Williams has said Chalky was the role he was proudest of after The Wire, which given what he did in The Wire is worth something.
What Went Wrong After Season Three
The show killed too many of the people it was about, and the ones who replaced them weren’t in the same class.
Jimmy dies at the end of season two. That was a defensible choice and removed the engine.
Gyp Rosetti dies at the end of season three, and he’s the best antagonist the show produced: a man whose defining trait is an inability to absorb an insult, in a business that runs entirely on absorbing them. Bobby Cannavale plays him as unpredictable. That’s rare.
Season four goes to Florida and Chicago and loses the thing that made the show specific. That was a city rendered so precisely you could navigate it. The Atlantic City of season one is a place. The season four settings are locations.
Season five jumps forward seven years to 1931 and spends a great deal of its time on flashbacks explaining how young Nucky became what he is. Nobody needed it, and it reduces a character to an origin.
Season five is where my patience ran out. The young Nucky flashbacks bored me, and every minute spent on them was a minute taken from the characters I still cared about. The deeper problem was always Nucky. His job is to be opaque and his professional skill isn’t committing. That makes him effective inside the world and inert as a lead. For three seasons the ensemble covered for that completely. Once they were gone, there was nothing in the middle. Buscemi is very good in the part. The part is the problem, and the show never solved it because it couldn’t admit what it was.
A protagonist whose competence lies in withholding will starve your story, and a strong supporting cast can hide it for a very long time. That’s the trap. If your central character’s professional skill is neutrality, patience or discretion, they can’t generate scenes, because generating a scene requires wanting something visibly.
The fix is to give them one thing they can’t be neutral about, and to establish it early enough that the reader has been waiting for it. Boardwalk Empire has this available and never uses it: Nucky’s dead child, his brother, his own childhood. All of them are raised and none becomes the thing he’ll break composure over.
The test is to ask what your protagonist would ruin themselves for. If you can’t answer in one sentence, they’ll need other people to carry every scene, and any structural change that removes those people will expose the hole immediately. Write the answer down before you write the second act.
The Production Is Part of the Point
The boardwalk was built to scale on a lot in Brooklyn, roughly three hundred feet of it, with the ocean added digitally, and it cost enough that the pilot alone became a news story.
That expenditure buys something specific. The show can shoot the boardwalk as a real place, at length, with crowds, from any angle. That means Atlantic City is a character instead of an establishing shot. The costume and production design won repeatedly and deserved to, and the detail extends to things nobody would check: correct period cash registers, accurate liquor labels, the right kind of glassware for a speakeasy versus a hotel bar.
Winter has said the research came first and the plots came out of it. That’s visible. The Mellon and Harding material, the Volstead Act mechanics, and the actual historical figures are treated as constraints on the story instead of as cameos.
Rothstein, Luciano, Lansky, Capone and Torrio are all real and all handled as men with businesses to run. That’s more interesting than treating them as legends.
The one indulgence is the dream sequences. They’re the weakest material in every season they appear in.
Should you watch Boardwalk Empire?
Yes, and stop at the end of season three. That’s where the story the show was telling ends: Jimmy is gone, Gyp is gone, and Nucky has won something that costs him what he had. Season four is watchable, mostly for Harrow’s last walk under the boardwalk, and season five shouldn’t exist. Those first three years justify the 9 on their own, and it’s a waste that a show this good killed off the people who made it work.
