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

Other xpost Nah, CC is going to turn into Iceberg Slim and be the hero of season 3.

I'd say CC is unambiguously a bad guy

I do think the bringing in CC's former bottom whore as Abby's activist partner has brought his shittiness into sharper focus

(lol @ Iceberg Slim, well-known good guy pimp! I guess he did ultimately renounce his wayward ways)

Good points, Shakey. I guess I'm just enjoying the ride but definitely there's a bunch of unrealistic crap worthy of whatever that awful Scorsese NYC A&R guy series was whose name I forgot. Though this is a much better sho, imho.

*show

Definitely more Suzi than Joan

that awful Scorsese NYC A&R guy series was whose name I forgot

VINYL! gawd that was so bad. also ref'd upthread lol

that steak order was confirmation that CC is 100% evil

tension def ramped up this episode. contradictions were heightened, one might say

was totally convinced that was David Proval playing the elder Martino in his one scene but apparently not...? That dude did look familiar though.

Armand Asante

No redemption for CC then.

My favourite new fact is that Blake Leyh wanted to use We Are All Prostitutes as the theme music for season 2 but David Simon wouldn't let him because he felt it was a bit too Do You See.

"let's go with 'This Year's Girl', it's much more subtle"

It's back, and it's 1985. They are giving us a version of the Jack Maple policing story. This show is great, but still feels pretty low-stakes.

so this is gonna be the "who is going to get AIDS?!" season eh

Yeah I guess :/

Sex, lies and videotape

"wolfpacks", AIDS, some anachronisms in the dialogue ( "run it back"? Who used that on the streets of NYC in '84?!) and a bit of a messy covering-all-bases feeling. Kind of a disappointing start.

Very much a "torn from today's headlines!!" vibe in the writing that felt facile. Let's see where they go. Still, the recreation of mid-80s NYC in the production- at least what I recall of it - is often uncanny.

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