The Deuce

[neckdeep]

Sorry, didn't know it was a documentary.

Docudrama, to be precise. Some characters are real, others are real but have different names, others are composites of real people and some are wholly fictional. For example, that Genovese mobster, Matty the Horse, was a real made guy and he really did control the nascent porn biz. The Franco twin characters were real, but had different names. The bar was called the Tin Pan Alley, not the Hi-Hat. Eileen/Candy is a composite character. Ruby/Thunderthighs was a real person and that is how she really died.

[Benny Profane]

Wow, they jumped ahead and skipped a few years. New theme song, new credits, just like The Wire, each season a change.

77 was when Benny was driving a cab in NYC. Interesting times. Just pre Aids.

[ill-advised strategy]

Dualing francos hits me wrong...too gimmicky

[teledad]

Digging the music so far in S2 - Elvis C, Jonathan Richman, Television, The Damned.

[Benny Profane]

Digging the music so far in S2 - Elvis C, Jonathan Richman, Television, The Damned.

I thought it was funny how he punched the radio or boom box or whatever on the bed stand playing a particularly irritating Talking Heads thing.

[Benny Profane]

Season 2 fini. Where's this go next? Has to be L.A., right? So what are they going to do with all the NY characters?

[neckdeep]

Season 2 fini. Where's this go next? Has to be L.A., right? So what are they going to do with all the NY characters?

They all die of AIDS.

The story stays in NY. This is the story of the Deuce, just like The Wire focused on the drug trade but ultimately was the story of Baltimore. Porn production may move to LA at the end of the 70's but the behind the scenes story of porn remains a NY story. For the next 10 years, the ownership of the industry is still ruthlessly enforced by the Five Families via control of the distribution networks. The story of the Deuce doesn't go to Hollywood. Rather, "Hollywood" comes to the Deuce in the end. The sex trades are expunged, the neighborhood gentrifies and then Disney comes in and buys everyone out. NY is also the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic which is when all the carefree good times around sex in general came to a screeching crash, in case you hadn't seen that story line looming large in every promiscuous gay sex scene. The sex workers will drop like flies too. Its the final nail in the coffin for that 70s zeitgeist that fueled season one.

Next stop, 1982 and the end of the party. AIDS, cocaine and the Mob take everything away. Rudy and Matty are gentlemen gangsters compared to some of the mobsters who will move into porn once they see the money flowing in from home video. It doesn't take a lot of brains to run porn so some of the most violent extortion and murder-for-hire type of wiseguys will move in. Once home video raises the stakes, porn suddenly becomes a dangerous space to operate in and people start getting clipped left and right. We saw the impact of Deep throat on the business. Well, a few of the Colombo wiseguys who were behind Deep Throat ended up dead, victims of their own success and huge video earnings. The man who developed the porn business for the Gambinos ends up dead too. Vince and company are pretty much a full on Gambino associate crew by season two's end and there are some seriously depraved people in the Gambinos. Inside the Gambinos, total psychos like Roy Demeo and Richard Kuklinski had interests in the porn business. The scene of Harvey rushing his back catalog into video cassette production is an omen of things to come.

Really liked this season. The final shot of the season was a brilliant moment of pathos. Everyone is having a good time and there's Vince, miserable and utterly trapped in the golden cage of his own making. The subtitle for Vince's tragic story could be "With the best of intentions, I accidentally started a mafia crew".

[Benny Profane]

Interesting that they totally ignored hetero sex clubs like Plato's Retreat.

Great Pretender's song/long track shot for the ending. Yeah, next stop, the "gay cancer".

[neckdeep]

I liked it.

A classic David Simon show that was unfairly overshadowed by Franco's personal issues and then virtually ghosted by critics afraid of drawing negative attention from the #metoo folks. It wasn't perfect, but it was good humanism/realism and it could make you reflect on life. It accomplished more in 25 hours than most shows get done in 75. IMHO, it was nice to have a limited series with a solid conclusion.

[teledad]

I could have done without the "ghosts" conclusion. I get what they were doing (comparing the Deuce then vs. now), but it came off a little ham handed and maudlin. I liked the rest though, particularly Maggie G's performance throughout.

[neckdeep]

I could have done without the "ghosts" conclusion. I get what they were doing (comparing the Deuce then vs. now), but it came off a little ham handed and maudlin. I liked the rest though, particularly Maggie G's performance throughout.

I liked the coda because it didn't let Vince off the hook. For me, one of the defining moments of the 3rd season was in Frankie's videotape at the wake where he concludes his story and says "You see, Vince may be the good one, but I'm the smart one!" The sad truth of the tale was that Frankie wasn't very clever and Vince wasn't half as good as he liked to pretend he was.

I thought the coda confronted Vince with some of his regrets. The Deuce changed and, I think, the point was that unlike Abby, Vince couldn't evolve with it and his glory days came to an abrupt end. He reads Candy's obit and realizes he never really knew who she was. Ashley/Dorothy asks him where Abby is and when he says he doesn't know, she just gives him the look that says "you fucked up". Bobby mentions Joey is going to prison for the third time and, of course, it was Vince who led Bobby and thereby Joey into the easy life of crime. Lori looks at him and she is practically pleading for help and he can't face her. Finally, he has to face his feelings of guilt about Frankie because Vince was the clever one who should have done better looking out for his reckless brother.

He's old, his day is long past and I think he sees Leon's ghost first because it signals Leon's last line. Vince is ready to "walk into the arms of time." These conflicted memories of the forgotten people are his legacy.

[Benny Profane]

Not happy about this last season. Pretty bad ending, with that hokey walk down memory lane. The writing and dialogue really started to suck halfway through this season. I had the feeling that it was an abandoned project, in a way. Maybe it was affected by Franco's issues with MeToo, but, I kinda doubt that. More important is the fact that HBO is now owned by AT&T, and the new CEO is a totally different animal than the old Time Warner dudes, and made it publicly know than he wants the culture changed dramatically at the studio. So, since this project started under the old regime, maybe it lost support and everyone mailed it in at the end. That girl shooting herself in the head was a metaphor for me of what happened to this series.