I didn't see a thread on this so I thought I'd start one. I think it looks awesome and I'm really looking forward to it. It premieres this Sunday at 9 on HBO.

[img:$uid]http://donnadestefano.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/boardwalk-empire-la-1-14-10.jpg[/img:$uid]

In the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y., HBO and executive producers Terence Winter and Martin Scorsese have brought a 300-foot section of the Atlantic City Boardwalk, circa 1920, back to three-dimensional life, for the history-inspired drama "Boardwalk Empire," premiering Sunday.

Although the view beyond the sandy beach is of a wall of stacked shipping containers - and some of the taller bits and further-away bits will be filled in with computer-generated animation - from certain angles, the illusion is remarkable and complete.

Based on the nonfiction book "Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times and Corruption of Atlantic City," by Nelson Johnson, the series stars Steve Buscemi ("The Sopranos," "Fargo") as county treasurer Enoch "Nucky" Thompson, a political fixer and backroom dealer who runs the city from his room at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. While Nucky has carved out a comfortable niche for himself between politics and organized crime, the arrival of Prohibition and also of a lovely but unhappily married Irish immigrant, Mrs. Margaret Schroeder (Kelly Macdonald), threaten simultaneously to line Nucky's pockets and put him in peril from the grimly determined Agent Van Alden (Michael Shannon). Also starring are Shea Whigham, Michael Stuhlbarg, Frank Crudele, Vincent Piazza, Stephen Graham, Michael Kenneth Williams, Gretchen Mol, Dabney Coleman and Paz de la Huerta.

On this chilly night, an election is under way, and there's a carnival atmosphere on set, aided by a stilt walker in striped pants and the Wild Man of Borneo. Extras, many in clothing from the period, stroll the planks or, as with a group of seersucker-suited young swells in straw boaters, are pushed along in wheeled wicker carts. With the luxurious lobby of the Ritz-Carlton, the swanky dress shop and the sweetshop selling saltwater taffy, it could be any seaside resort - except for one attraction. Created when the inventor of incubators could not convince doctors to buy his creation, the glass-walled "Incubator Baby" room boasts "Babies Under 3 Lbs.," cared for by nurses in the full view of the public.

"It became a sideshow exhibit," says Winter, a few months later in Los Angeles (with Buscemi and Macdonald also present), "and saved thousands of lives." While such an exhibition would be unthinkable today - except perhaps in a reality-TV show - Winter doesn't see this world as being all that different from our own.

"It's very much about America and ambition," he says. "The one thing that jumps out at me as I write this is, the more things change, the more things stay the same, in terms of political corruption and being in bed with big business - and essentially Prohibition is the drug trade.

"Young guys who are ambitious and violent, who want to make a lot of money, traffic in this illegal substance. You just change the commodity, and it's the same thing.

"So it really holds a mirror up to society."

While other historic locations in New York City also appear, it's the boardwalk itself that's the heart of the show - and it's helpful to the actors as well.

"Sometimes when we're shooting in the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton," says Buscemi, "which is huge, I go, 'All right, this was all built.' It's incredible."

"The boardwalk was hugely helpful for me," says the Scottish Macdonald, "because I had no reference. I think about Atlantic City, and I think about Boardwalk and Park Place (in the Monopoly game). Atlantic City conjured up no images."

While he played a tough gangster in "The Sopranos," Buscemi is actually rather gentlemanly as Thompson, who would rather deal than fight.

"I can't help but like him," Buscemi says. "He's a fascinating guy. He's complicated. I think he does have a good heart. He genuinely wants to build this city. He wants to give the people what they want, and I think his attitude was, 'If they don't want me to do it anymore, I won't be elected.'

"He likes being a politician, and he likes being a leader - and he likes the amount of money he siphons off. But he spreads the wealth. What's good for him is good for Atlantic City, and it's good for the people there.

"When Prohibition hit, it was just too good of an opportunity to pass up. Certainly, it made him even more corrupt, but I think he just saw it as, 'This is the way things are going, and I'd be a fool not to join in.'"

[Edited 9/16/10 18:44pm]

The Trailer...

If I could afford HBO, I'd watch it.

Television review: 'Boardwalk Empire'

The new HBO series has gangsters, pious federal agents and Martin Scorsese's considerable heft. It's a good, not great, combination.

ADULT PLAYGROUND: The show, with Steve Buscemi and Paz de la Huerta, is set in Atlantic City. (Abbot Genser / HBO)

The participation of Martin Scorsese as an executive producer and the director of its pilot episode would make HBO's big new "Boardwalk Empire" — which premieres Sunday — an event, regardless of whether it were any good. (As it happens, it is good, though perhaps not great; cable shows make their meaning known slowly, and even the six episodes I've seen seem too few to know.) Scorsese is not the first famous director of Filmland to have worked on the small screen, but among his generation he is the weightiest, and the pairing of the maker of "Goodfellas" and "Casino" with a writer from "The Sopranos" — Terence Winter, that series' busiest writer after its creator, David Chase — would seem as natural as that of spaghetti and meatballs.

The story opens in 1920, literally on the eve of Prohibition, as Atlantic City treasurer and political kingpin Enoch "Nucky" Thompson, played by Steve Buscemi (Irish for the occasion), lays out his plan for keeping his city as wet as an unprintable metaphor while the country goes officially dry. Atlantic City was the Las Vegas of its time, and this is in many respects the origin story of the shadow world that both Scorsese and Winter have already devoted much energy to exploring. Thompson is based on the real-life Enoch Johnson, the name change perhaps indicating that — in spite of the presence of such gangland household names as Lucky Luciano (Vincent Piazza), Al Capone ( Stephen Graham) and Arnold Rothstein (Michael Stuhlbarg) — this is not to be taken as docudrama but as historical fantasia, a meditation on big characters in changing times.

There's no question that this is one of the most interesting and accomplished shows of the new season, though it's also true that there is not much competition this year. It's not the greatest thing since sliced bread but rather a well-made sort of sliced bread, a thing you have had before but prepared with quality ingredients by bakers who know their business. If it doesn't seem as fresh or new or gripping as the Scorsese-Winters brand might suggest, it's in part because it's rooted not only in the conventions and obsessions of the director's own canon but in a decade's worth of "Sopranos"-influenced cable television as well.

As in Scorsese's other historical dramas, there is a contradictory impulse to both locate the domestic within the legendary and make myth from the course of human events. As re-created physically and digitally, the Atlantic City Boardwalk of 1920 is something both less and more than real — marvelously suggestive and patently artificial. Winter and his writing staff scrupulously — a little too scrupulously at times — signpost the era with references to vacuum cleaners and machine guns, Dale Carnegie and Sinclair Lewis, the League of Nations and the Ku Klux Klan. And as on "Deadwood" and " Mad Men," there is an archeological approach to language. Speech does matter here: We know that abused baker's wife Margaret Schroeder (Kelly MacDonald) is smarter than her station by her consistently proper use of "whom," and gangster-as-Rotarian Nucky, whose formal way of talking sets him apart from the younger thugs coming up around him, is also a stickler for grammar. It's possibly not the least of what draws those characters together.

As its creator and show-runner, the show more properly belongs to Winters than to Scorsese, but the director's symphonic style is unmistakably evident in the pilot, which plays to his strengths — the re-creation of place, the contrapuntal choreography of crowds, passages of suspense and moments of intensity — and scants the more delicate emotional matter that dominates later episodes (many directed by "Sopranos" vets, clearly working with shorter shooting schedules and smaller budgets). The oblique angles, fast dollies into close-up, extended tracking shots; a besotted attention to color; the music-nerd soundtrack — even if you decide not to follow the series, it's worth your while to watch this opening salvo.

As is everywhere the case in modern cable drama, morally compromised antiheroes are kept relatively attractive by making sure there's always someone worse around. We root for Nucky's difficult protégé Jimmy Darmody ( Michael Pitt) as opposed to, say, Jimmy's new friend, young Al Capone, because he's more sensitive and intelligent, not because he's any less criminal or deadly. We side with Nucky himself, who is not above having someone killed, because he would rather not have to, and because he misses his late wife and takes people as they come. Just so, the federal agent out to bring him down ( Michael Shannon) is presented, unfortunately, as a high-strung religious nut, which is supposed to make him seem more complex but just makes him seem more of a cliché.

There's another story here, and it's one that cable, with its surplus of damaged males, tells over and over: Men (selfish, short-sighted, perpetually adolescent) are bad news for women. Just as in "Mad Men" or " Breaking Bad," the female characters emerge as stronger and more sympathetic, and women's suffrage is indeed a recurring theme here, loudly stated. At the same time, I should not have to point out to anyone who subscribes to HBO, there are a lot of naked women around. In the science of premium cable this is what's called "giving them their money's worth." Nucky would doubtless see no contradiction.

[Edited 9/16/10 18:41pm]

I'm going to give this a shot, though I wasn't a huge Soprano fan or that much a mobster fan, but it looks beautiful.

This looks promising

I plan on checking it out.