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

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

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