In "The Deuce" sex is business
Journalist-turned-TV producer David Simon is particularly good at two things, exposing the mindless, brutal institutions and systems that grind Americans down and humanizing people who normally exist at the margins of polite conversation.
Journalist-turned-TV producer David Simon is particularly good at two things, exposing the mindless, brutal institutions and systems that grind Americans down and humanizing people who normally exist at the margins of polite conversation.
When Simon tackled those subjects in HBO's The Wire, he created one of the best series on television. Now he's created the best new show of the 2017 fall season in HBO's The Deuce (debuting this Sunday), a gritty, urban drama about the moment pornography became "street legal" in New York City and the commodification of flesh became an industry.
- (WARNING! This is a show about porn, so this review discusses adult themes)
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Because it's Simon (working with Wire buddies like crime novelist Richard Price and Deuce co-creator George Pelecanos), the world created here is so accurately run down and sleazy you want to take a shower after every episode.
Prostitutes give oral sex in phone booths and cops shrug when they have a night where there are only a couple of rapes in the neighborhood. In one impressive wide shot, a character walks across a sprawling street filled with period-specific cars as the city skyline rises in the distance, looking exactly like the time of John Lindsay and Max's Kansas City.
The show is also loosely based on reality, inspired by the real-life stories of two twin brothers who served as frontmen for the Gambino crime family in Manhattan.
The show is also loosely based on reality, inspired by the real-life stories of two twin brothers who served as frontmen for the Gambino crime family in Manhattan.
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| NY was my personal kingdom back then. |
James Franco plays fictionalized versions of both men -- Vincent, a straight-shooting bar manager, and Frankie, a charismatic, degenerate gambler. Vincent starts out as a typical Simon protagonist: He's smart, working-class, unassuming and more than a little flawed, ground-down by two thankless jobs and a wayward wife. Opportunity comes knocking when a Gambino captain sets him up to run his own bar.
But Franco's role isn't the gimmick it might seem. He gives Vincent and Frankie markedly different attitudes -- Vincent in particular becomes the guy you want to root for even when his wife's cheating pushes him to leave her and their two kids for a room in a Times Square flophouse. Franco even directs two of the show's eight episodes.
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| Gyllenhaal plays a prostitute who begins to see a way off the street (Paul Schiraldi/HBO) |
The real revelation here is Maggie Gyllenhaal, who shines as Candy, a prostitute who begins to see a way off the street by moving into porn films.
Candy works independently, without the protection of the pimps who controlled most of the Deuce's streetwalkers, and Gyllenhaal exposes herself both physically and emotionally. When one kid tries to get a freebie after their first session ends quickly, Candy is quick to school him: Car salesmen don't give a customer an extra car just because he closes a sale quickly.
The sex in The Deuce isn't titillating, and that's by design. It's a business transaction: either a momentary pleasure sold by a prostitute or an awkward fantasy depicted in amateurish films. It is, however, explicit, with equal opportunity nudity (including at least three instances where a male penis is shown in an, um, excited state, which I have never seen on a TV series before).
24-hour porn access today
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| I'm not addicted, I always wore eyeglasses, and leave me alone, I'm busy right now! |
It's tough to imagine today, when the Internet offers 24-hour access to pornography, but in the early 1970s movies and magazines depicting sex were illegal.
Then a Supreme Court decision tied such laws to local community standards, and suddenly pornography was legal in New York City. As one character, a porn director, explains, "There's been a change in the law about community standards. Apparently, New York has none."
Before long, police are pushing prostitutes off the streets and into Mob-owned brothels, which pay the cops for protection.
Porn movie producers are paying those same prostitutes a pittance to star in their movies, and pimps are fighting to stay in control as the sex trade transforms beneath their feet. More + AUDIO
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