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

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