Boardwalk Empire

Boardwalk Empire is a television show on HBO starring Steve Buscemi as Nucky Thompson, the treasurer of Atlantic City during Prohibition.

There's a lot that I like about this series. To begin with, the first episode was some great storytelling. I really liked the way the episode began with a scene that had no context, but that was gradually unpacked as the episode progressed. The show does a good job of juggling these multiple storylines. While any good television show must be able to do that, Boardwalk Empire seems to have an especially good penchant for plot twists.

This leads to another thing I like about Boardwalk Empire - the way that it simultaneously keeps one foot in the world of the familiar, and one foot in the world of the unknown - it rides the edge of normalcy, so that while things all seem to progress fairly normally, they can very quickly get weird. One example is the end of the second episode, when the survivor of the Episode 1 massacre shows up in a scene evocative of a zombie horror film.

There's an element of playfulness in this, too. Even though the show takes place in the 1920s, we are conscious, the show makes us conscious, that we're watching it in the present, in the world of the 2010s, and that we can't dismiss all of that prior knowledge we bring to the show. Shows set many decades ago have that funny balance - at once familiar, and yet totally foreign. The familiar, in the form of shops, casino games, liquor, food, but also the totally foreign, in the form of slang, clothing, and (most especially) the extremely poor treatment of women, minorities, and anyone considered "non-normal."

There was a line from the character Margaret - who is introduced to Nucky Thompson in the first episode - where she speaks with Buscemi in an Irish accent. "Sounds like you've still got a bit of the Old World," Buscemi's character says. "My husband says I sound like an immigrant," she replies. Just a few days before, I had listened to a New Yorker Out Loud podcast called "White People," which focused on an MTV documentary on the topic of whiteness, and touched on immigration, particularly the role it is playing in the current presidential campaign. One of the things that came up was, "white" didn't just refer to the color of someone's skin. It had deeper connotations. Immigrants from France, Italy, Germany, Ireland, although they were light-skinned, weren't considered "white" because they were immigrants. These kinds of distinctions, and the evolution of language and attitudes around immigration, are definitely highlighted when Boardwalk Empire shows you interactions between "white people" and various minority groups.

I'm also a fan of the aesthetics of the show. There are some great shots of the sky at sunrise, the beach, artistic shots of crowds at funerals, elaborate churches and speakeasies, and some really fantastic touches to bring 1920s Atlantic City to life. Every detail, down to the cigarettes, matches what it would have looked like during that era. It can be difficult to look at old photos from bygone eras and imagine all of those people in full color and full life, running around as normal human beings. The old photographs, the written accounts, can come off as stiff, and make it hard to relate to the past. But a show like Boardwalk Empire brings that world to life. At the same time, though, you feel like you're looking at a facade. This comes across particularly strongly when looking at the Atlantic City boardwalk itself, but also in some of the hotel rooms and offices: you feel like the set is so elaborately detailed, so perfect in every detail, that it's almost a farce - as though it were more perfect than the real thing.

Then again, the show takes place in Atlantic City - Las Vegas before there was Las Vegas - so you have to wonder if some of that gilded, surface-deep detail, the perfection of the set design, comes across as fake in a way that would have come across as fake even then. That aspect of Vegas where you know all they're really after is your money, and that all of the luxury and service and entertainment and keeping you happy is all there and is all happening simply because it allows the casino to make money.