As "Boardwalk Empire" tells us, pols come and go, but the people who pull the political strings are "here to stay"

Nucky Introduces Margaret

In the opening episode of HBO's Prohibition-era miniseries Boardwalk Empire, at the birthday bash Atlantic County Treasurer (and boss) Enoch "Nucky" Thompson (Steve Buscemi) threw for himself, he introduced his Irish-immigrant working-class "discovery" (and future mistress, or rather one of his mistresses), Mrs. Margaret Schroeder (Kelly Macdonald), to his great political hope, Sen. Walter Edge (Geoff Pierson), and his great intrastate rival, Jersey City Mayor (and boss) Frank Hague (Chris Mulkey).

"Guys like Edge will come and go. But bosses, like us -- we're here to stay."

-- Mayor Hague to Nucky, in episode 6, "Family Limitation"

by Ken

There's a lot that I'm liking a lot about Boardwalk Empire, but especially now in this season of political saturation what I think I'm liking best is its angle on corruption, and I mean corruption of all kinds: financial, political, sexual, and just plain personal -- categories that of course overlap all over the place.

New Yorker TV critic Nancy Franklin made a point in the Oct. 4 issue which doesn't get made often enough. In attempting to sort through the fall season's pile-up of new shows, she pointed out that networks generally send out pilot episodes of new shows long in advance, presumably hoping to generate buzz, in contrast to cable channels' frequent practice of sending out half a dozen episodes closer to actual air time, so that "first responders have the privilege of witnessing work that has some shape, some vision, some story line."

The second and third episodes of a show may reveal themselves to be not very different from the first, but it's quite often the case that not until you get past the logjam of plot-and-names-and-relationships-establishing in a pilot do you get an idea of what a show is really aiming for. I feel as uncomfortable judging most shows on the basis of one episode as I would buying a pair of shoes based on the way one shoe fits. Actually, watching only a pilot is more like buying shoes online -- you have no idea whether they'll fit at all. If TV series are books, pilots aren't first chapters; they're forewords, or jacket copy.

I should add that Franklin is well aware of how often network shows live or die by that first episode. She makes what seems to me the unimpeachable point, in this case in the context of a much-ballyhooed but short-lived Fox show I never did see:

If a show like "Lone Star" really does have promise, a network should figure out a better way to sell it and to let it find an audience. What's genuinely strange, from a creative-business standpoint, is that the networks seem to care both a lot and hardly at all about how their shows will fare.

[Here Franklin goes on to talk about broadcast networks' habit of promoting pilot episodes to death, including soliciting feedback based on mere teasers of clips posted online, vs. the frequent cable practice of providing those half-dozen episodes.]

I should add that, grateful as I am to Franklin for making this point, I've never found her useful a critic, and a case in point is her review of Boardwalk Empire, which I just stumbled on and glanced at while searching online for the Oct. 4 piece. Her exhaustive cataloguing of previous work of various participants strikes me, as a reckoning of this show, as screechingly stupid.

DOESN'T THE NEW YORKER HAVE EDITORS WHO
CAN SAY, "NANCY, THIS IS REALLY, REALLY DOPEY"?

Really now, by the time you've reached the point of damning Boardwalk Empire for having Tom Aldredge play the father of Nucky Thompson and his fascinatingly maladroit brother Eli, the Atlantic County sheriff, on the ground that Aldredge played the father of Carmela Soprano in The Sopranos, shouldn't you really be looking for a more suitable line of work? Aldredge is a really good actor who has given really good and quite different performances of these two very different roles, neither of which is by any stretch of the imagination central enough to cause any confusion for any viewer with a working brain. (Is an actor of Aldredge's age no longer allowed to play anyone's father? Should he wait to be cast as, say, a bat mitzvah girl?) Doesn't The New Yorker have editors capable of saying, "Jeez, Nancy, even if we have readers who are total morons, isn't this over-the-top dopey?"

I think the shoe-buying analogy is indicative of a deep-rotted problem. I'm sure Franklin knows that shoes and TV shows have pretty much nothing in common as consumer products. However, it didn't seem to occur to her how wrong-headed the analogy is. The "fit" of a pair of shoes, as far as I can tell, could hardly be less like the "fit" of a TV show.

And as I think about it, while I was at first inclined to give our Nancy the benefit of the doubt about why it's so hard to judge a show from the pilot, as I think about it I'm not so sure. Yes, it's possible that what she describes can happen, that "until you get past the logjam of plot-and-names-and-relationships-establishing in a pilot do you get an idea of what a show is really aiming for. But when she write about later shows possibly not being much different from the first, I think we have to say that she's attributing the problem to the show rather than the way we take it in. In my experience, in almost all cases where it took me a while to "get an idea of what a show is really aiming for," the problem wasn't the show, it was me.

When the show's creative team is aiming for something genuinely its own (dare I say "something original"?), it can take awhile to tune into the correct frequency -- as happened to me just last season, some readers may recall, with Modern Family. In all those cases, when I went back to the pilot, I discovered that it was all, or mostly all, there from the start; it just took me time to "get it." I don't think this is at all what our Nancy is suggesting.

Certainly Franklin is right to care about a show's pedigree, but they seem to matter to her in a very different way from the ways in which they matter to me. Among the many names involved on the creative side of Boardwalk Empire, the one that really got my attention is that of the credited creator (though only one of the predictably many executive producers), Terence Winter. Among the amazing team of writer-producers David Chase assembled for The Sopranos, Winter seemed to occupy a position of particular prominence.

Of course even the highest-level contribution to a show created by somebody else doesn't tell you what somebody's going to do when he/she is the principal creator of his/her own. Still, if you're looking for some kind of guidance as to which shows may be worth looking at, this kind of credit rates high with me. In the case of Boardwalk Empire, now that I have six episodes under my belt, the Winter connection seems to me to have paid off handsomely.

It's hard to talk much more specifically about this theme of corruption that so intrigues me about Boardwalk Empire without going into exhaustive detail about plot and circumstances. In general terms, though, in every episode we've gotten what seem to me beautifully detailed portraits of how deep that impulse to corruption runs. Hand in hand with the impulse to establish rules that make human society possible is an impulse to game those rules, to find ways above, below, around, and even through them for those various kinds of personal advantage I noted above.

Prohibition, which is about to begin as episode 1 does, is a splendid backdrop for this sort of inquiry into, or maybe exposition of, corruption. It would be hard to overstate the level of hypocrisy involved in the madness that overtook the country and allowed undoubtedly understandable pleas for temperance to be blown up into a constitutional amendment, the 18th, permitting the prohibition of "intoxicating" beverages, and the Volstead Act, which made Prohibition a reality, which instead of ending the production and consumption of alcoholic beverages had the obvious effect of transforming it into an underground enterprise, doing little to reduce consumption, but making it more expensive and more dangerous, and of course creating a whole new class of criminal enterprise, into which there were, naturally enough, no shortage of low-life types ready and willing to move. (The show does a lovely job of showing us Women's Temperance League types being played for patsies by Prohibition profiteers.)

And so we have Atlantic City boss Nucky Thompson not just controlling illegal-alcohol sales in his county but smuggling in product (and adultering it to increase the supply) to wet the whistle of what seems like half the country. Boardwalk Empire does a dandy job of portraying the layers, from top to bottom, of financial, political, and moral corruption needed to get the job done. The series is also wonderfully alert to the general power dynamic, in terms of the services a smart boss like Nucky (and Steve Buscemi is really sensational in the role) has to provide his constituents to maintain the base for his, er, more lucrative activities.

Sexual corruption is also much on display. Prostitution fits the model perfectly: In exchange for that small bit of control the money earned gives the women over their lives, the prostitutes make big-time money for their male bosses, and have the additional privilege of servicing their other needs. Poor Mrs. Schroeder, whom we see above in the first episode, is tailor-made for exploitation. She starts out as a battered wife, then has the good fortune to have her beast of a husband killed, except that the good fortune turns ugly when she has to find a way to support herself and her two small children, which in turn sets her up as a prime candidate for sexual exploitation.

There's even some sort of deviant governmental-sexual corruption (or maybe governmental psycho-sexual corruption? I don't have a name for it!) embodied in the square-jawed, zealous Internal Revenue guy, Van Alden (Michael Shannon), pressed into service as a pioneering Prohibition enforcement officer, whose single-minded focus goes beyond obsessive devotion to duty, as was finally made clear in the freaky ending of episode 6, into the realm of the psychologically whacked-out.

BUT I SET OUT TO TALK ABOUT THE
DEEP ROOTS OF POLITICAL CORRUPTION

In this connection the line I've quoted up top, from the mouth of the fictionalized version of Jersey City boss Frank Hague, really grabbed me. As represented in the show, Hague is the Democratic-aligned North Jersey boss and Nucky Thompson (based, it appears, on a historical personage name of Enoch L. Johnson) the Republican-aligned South Jersey boss. In the series so far, we've seen them sparring over federal and state money for roads, road-construction money being of course already in the '20s a prime target for a political boss, because that money travels through him to all sorts of people he controls, or wishes to control, or at least to influence.

Nucky's need is even more basic, though: For Atlantic City's development, he needs decent roads to connect both to New York City and to Philadelphia, to make his bailiwick an easy destination for revelers from the big cities. In this scene he has been trying to intimidate or at least coopt Hague with the future importance of Senator Edge, whose path he thinks he can grease all the way to the White House. (Hey, a boss can dream! Geoff Pierson does his usual bang-up job of giving us an outward appearance of hearty wholesomeness that just barely conceals a core of utter rot.) Hague doesn't intimidate or coopt that easily, and clues Nucky in that his Republican golden boy may not have such a straight path to the White House, what with his involvement in business hanky-panky in the boss's Democratic precincts. Nucky wants to know why Hague is sharing this information, and the Jersey City boss provides the touching homily quoted above.

Change the names and identities just a bit, and you've got American political life in the year 2010. Why, we even have the Teabaggers playing the role of the temperance-league patsies. Not to mention this stirring tribute to the principle of bipartisanship as practiced in an era earlier than our own.

[New episodes of Boardwalk Empire air Sunday nights at 9pm ET on HBO, with the usual round of repeats throughout the week. Earlier episodes can be seen via On Demand, and are bound to be "marathonned."]

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