The television shows of David Simon teem with fascinating, complex characters, but at their essence they’re all about social ecosystems. He’s adroit when it comes to encompassing the full scope of a place and time, tracing the invisible connections between seemingly disparate parts of a population to show how they’re all subject to the same institutional forces. “It’s all in the game,” went the constant refrain on Simon’s masterpiece The Wire. At the time, it referred to the intricate culture of drug commerce in Baltimore; he’s now trained his circumspect sights on the neon-lit cesspool of 70s New York, and unearthed an economy just as knotty (while twice as naughty) in the era’s flourishing business of flesh.

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Most TV pilots get saddled with the unenviable legwork of introducing and providing a small taste of depth for a full ensemble of characters that an audience could conceivably see themselves spending a season with. And in its 87 unhurried minutes, the premiere of Simon’s latest series The Deuce, in collaboration with co-creator George Pelecanos, sets up a sprawling network of colorful figures linked by the sale, display and distribution of sex. Individually engrossing, the characters join together to form a frank portrait of American striving.

We meet the flamboyantly attired pimps and their stables of girls, struggling hustlers and ambivalent cops, each one more than meets the eye. An ingenue fresh off the bus (Emily Meade) has more guile to her than she lets on, and yet less than she thinks. The pimp (Gary Carr) who lures her into his crew before she can even make it out of the station plays the role of the magnanimous provider, but turns violent and brutish without cause or warning. A curly-haired tough cookie of a prostitute (Maggie Gyllenhaal) represents herself without male assistance, firmly businesslike when explaining to a teen John why he can’t get two handjobs for the price of one, and then tender and maternal when making the occasional visit to her daughter. Simon shows us what appears to be a vicious sexual assault, just so that he can expose it as a committed role-play a moment later. Nothing is as it seems at first brush. Look closer.



Times Square is the scuzzy nucleus around which this collection of unstable atoms furiously revolve, getting ready to combust with the advent of mass-produced porno. The pilot doesn’t quite reckon with the upcoming sea change in smut as much as it throws out the occasional omen, and yet change is palpable in the air. The gradual realization that there was far more money to be made in the studio than on the sidewalk revolutionized the city’s sex trade by shifting authority to the women, though as with all things in Simon’s grey-shaded world, it’s not that simple. The pilot doesn’t shy away from the uglier realities that women in the oldest profession faced at the time, and while X-rated film helped get these women out from under their abusive handlers’ thumbs, it created troubling new forms of objectification as well.

There’s one more piece to this puzzle that the pilot deliberately refrains from pressing into place. James Franco headlines the series as a pair of mustachioed twin brothers, contrasting portraits of battered moralism and oily self-interest. As the proprietor of a 42nd Street watering hole, Vincent Martino strives to conduct himself ethically, but can’t resist the lures of drugs and infidelity. (Though, to be fair, his perfidious wife, played by Zoe Kazan, screwed around first.) Meanwhile, his good-for-nothing brother Frankie has been racking up debts all over town, imperiling his brother’s business by association. Simon’s clearly got big plans for the two of them, but in these early stages they’re more adjacent to “the game” than in it. Vincent’s bar gives the dramatic personae a convenient place to converge, and yet he doesn’t emerge with a scot-free conscience. The episode’s final shot confronts him with his own complicity in the wrongdoing all around him, and marks him as a man determined to do something about it. Even viewers unaware of the show’s pornographic future can feel the fate of hangdog Vincent beginning to dovetail with it.

One of the key factors that hobbled The Wire’s popularity during its early seasons was the difficulty of keeping its massive cast straight; The Deuce has the benefit of boasting a few name-brand actors impossible to forget, but even so, it does not demand such a high price of admission to its absorptive world. Writing unencumbered by the jargon of police work or Show Me A Hero’s bureaucratic government lingo, Simon has created his most accessible work of humanism to date, and he’s done so without sacrificing his loftier ambitions of societal critique. (An instant-favorite monologue exposes Nixon’s Vietnam doctrine as pimping under the guise of policy.) “All the pieces matter” is another one of Simon’s classic axioms, and even before his new creations have fully come into focus, he’s re-convinced us of the statement’s truth.