The Deuce, HBO’s next big drama, has undeniable swagger. Set in an era before Ubers and the big cleanup, the ’70s-set series meanders and pimp walks—literally—through Manhattan and Brooklyn. The camera doesn’t jump to different characters and scenes so much as it passes between them, flowing between bartenders and patients, prostitutes and johns, police officers and drug dealers and NYU students buying street-corner speed. There’s a tension between this laid-back gait and the threat of violence that’s really pacing the pilot—the fear, for the characters as well as the viewers—of the big bad lurking beyond the next street corner.
The first episode of The Deuce, which premiered Friday at New York’s Split Screens Festival, is bookended by violence—a robbery and a cutting—opening on a closed fist and ending with the flash of a switchblade. There’s an art to this set-up. By starting with a robbery, The Deuce makes a promise not to shy away from all things dark, dirty, and unsettling. This creates a tense momentum, ensuring that every “date” between a prostitute and a john has us bracing ourselves for the worst. After an hour of navigating the treacherous ecosystem of sex and power populated by sex workers and opportunistic pimps, threats of violence finally come to fruition when Ashley (Jamie Neumann) gets brutally chastised for slacking off. Unleashing this episode’s most brutal scene right before the credits roll intensifies the entire experience, heightening the tension and making every unexpectedly light or funny scene feel all the more welcome.
Of course, watching The Deuce isn’t just an exercise in covering your eyes or waiting for comedic relief. The show’s appeal stems from its creators—The Wire’s George Pelecanos and David Simon—and its ridiculously talented cast. Based on the true story of Vincent and Frankie Martino, The Deuce sets out to chronicle 1970s New York City through the eyes of sex-industry vets and up-and-coming pornographers. It’s admittedly well-trod material, bordering on cliché. “We had no burning desire to do a show about porn,” Pelecanos prefaced the series premiere. “It’s been done before. But the characters were too rich to ignore.”
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Given The Deuce’s set and scope, cinematic references like Taxi Driver, Mean Streets, and The Panic in Needle Park immediately come to mind. But The Wire—which lends alums like Gbenga Akinnagbe, Lawrence Gilliard Jr., Chris Bauer, Anwan Glover, and Michael Kostroff to this new HBO project—is equally relevant. Simon and Pelecanos have a gift for casting ensembles and stocking a series with a surplus of genuinely interesting characters and subplots. If anything, The Deuce has too many fascinating threads to reasonably follow. There’s the Martino twins, a Times Square bar manager and a profligate gambler, brought to life by James Franco and his lustrous side burns. Then there’s Candy (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a sex worker poised to make a splash in New York’s nascent adult entertainment industry. Candy’s friends all have pimps, and their business tactics and New York haunts—the train station to pick up new girls, the diner that serves cocaine and breakfast all day—are already begging for a spinoff. And that’s not to mention the policemen, barkeeps, mobsters, johns, and NYU freshmen who also manage to find their way to Times Square, flitting in and out of focus.
Perhaps most representative of The Deuce’s ambition and sheer potential is the pay-by-the-hour hotel where prostitutes take their dates, and where Franco’s Vincent finds himself checking in after walking out on his wife. Pushing past the front desk and up the dingy stairs at various points throughout the premiere, we gain access, each time, to a new room and a new vignette. There’s a virgin buying his first blow job with a personal check, an old man who will pay extra just for the company, and a rape fantasy gone wrong. These discrete scenes stand out, exposing the mundane humiliations and joys taking place between lovers and strangers behind closed doors.
Immediately, The Deuce sets a standard for sidestepping or overturning tropes whenever possible. The most compelling example of this is a scene where Darlene (Dominique Fishback) is attacked while opening the door to her hotel room. After the assumed assault, we see that Darlene had actually pre-arranged the fantasy encounter with a john, who will have to pay extra for being overzealous. The Deuce gets points for using sexual-assault imagery to actually advance the plot, illuminate a character and unexpectedly reveal her agency. Intriguingly, Darlene’s sex scene is paired with a sequence in which Candy goes home, takes off her wig, and listens to an answering-machine message in which her mother asks her to come home and see her son. While Darlene, who is black, evades some sex-worker stereotypes, there’s still a question here of which characters are allowed to be further humanized through backstory, and why.
When you’re dealing with two genres—pornography and prestige television—that have traditionally been defined by male auteurs, how do you make the jump from objectifying female bodies to creating full-fledged female characters? One answer is putting women like Michelle MacLaren, who directed The Deuce’s pilot, behind the camera. Additionally, Gyllenhaal simultaneously plays the role of Candy and serves as a producer on the project—a title she actually insisted on as a form of insurance. “I wanted some kind of guarantee that they wanted not just my body but also my mind,” Gyllenhaal explained during a panel after the screening. “I was curious whether I could play a woman who is in pretty dire straits, and challenge myself to make sure she had a working mind while doing it.” She added, “I want to be part of the storytelling and the conversation about what happens to this woman.”
At times, what may have been behind-the-scenes conversations about feminist ethos and implications seem to bleed into the script. In one such scene, Candy quickly segues from oral sex into a rumination on her professional code of contact, explaining to a pubescent john that sex work isn’t her hobby or her identity, but her job. Potential anachronisms aside, it’s easy to imagine why this empowering rhetoric would appeal to an actor, and there’s no dearth of fascinating, multi-faceted women to play here.
Naturally, half the fun of watching The Deuce is witnessing a pricey re-creation of 1970s New York, complete with vintage cars, leather outfits, and fluorescent marquees. According to MacLaren, “Every poster and sign in this pilot is accurate.” To time travel as accurately as possible to the ’70s, production cordoned off a two-block section of Washington Heights and went about meticulously bringing the old Times Square back to life with the help of CG technology. Watching Franco strut down the avenue past exposed genitalia and Cadillacs for thirty seconds is worth an hour of tune-in time alone. Of course, pilots are almost unanimously overburdened with (necessary) set-up, and The Deuce is no exception. The real fun will be in watching this world develop and change, as Candy and her co-stars find themselves at the forefront of the burgeoning porn industry, now in front of the camera.
