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

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

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