But that doesn’t make it any less inquisitive or enriching.
With its smattering of stock characters and tidy narrative arcs, The Deuce is Simon’s soapiest series to date. The friendly mien of the series may be slightly dishonest about the difficulties faced by the real-life prostitutes and pimps eking out a living on the outskirts of Times Square, but it also offers them a certain dignity that a more panting, lurid series would surely deny them. The show is often disarmingly kind, devoid of much of the cruel nihilism and violence that have become endemic to prestige television. Simon, who co-created The Deuce with writer George Pelecanos, places his series somewhere between the wish and the truth. Of course, the reality of that time was far from the fantasy-it was hard and grimy and headed for catastrophe. Instead, it’s the scuzzy Manhattan of the early 1970s, when the sex industry, which takes focus here, thrived on 42nd Street as drugs and white flight conspired to lay waste to the city.Īsk many New York transplants which past era of the city they wish they could have lived in, and many would say the 1970s, when the pre-AIDS, Studio 54 disco was still raging and the streets were coated in a patina of “authentic” grit. But it’s not today’s New York that Simon sifts through in his new HBO series The Deuce.
Writer David Simon’s fascination with American cities has taken him, and us, to Baltimore, to New Orleans, to Yonkers, and now, at long last, to New York-that great, teeming city to beat all cities, whose many systems are ripe for Simon’s thorough, humane style of investigation.