David Simon is a master storyteller, and a founding father of the Golden Age of Television. The Wire is, of course, his crowning achievement, but all of his series for HBO—whether it be the underrated New Orleans saga Treme or his smaller-scale limited series The Corner, Generation Kill, and Show Me a Hero—have proven Simon to be a titan of the medium. He approaches television like a novelist, and that's why his most regular collaborators—Richard Price, George Pelacanos, Dennis Lehane—are celebrated fiction writers themselves.

The Deuce, his new HBO series co-created with Pelacanos, has all the trappings of a David Simon show—and draws all of the expected comparisons to his magnum opus. Once again centering around a vice-based industry (prostitution)—yet this time a period piece (taking place in 1971 New York City, with a focus on the formerly seedy pre-Giuliani Times Square)—The Deuce has already, with its pilot episode, set the stage for a large-scale, multi-narrative series. Like New York itself, The Deuce brings together a variety of characters with competing intentions. But what these men and women have in common is a need for survival—and those ends will be met by drastically dramatic means.

What the men and women on The Deuce have in common is a need for survival—and those ends will be met by drastically dramatic means.

Like Simon's previous series, The Deuce examines its world from multiple entry points. There are the women working on the street and the pimps who manage and control them (and the women themselves come from various backgrounds, from as close as Brooklyn and the Bronx to as far away as Minnesota). There's a blossoming porn industry that will soon gain legitimacy and offer a more lucrative—and less dangerous—work environment for the women on the street. There are the cops who patrol the crime, often acting like coworkers to the men and women working the streets. And there are the bars in the area, where all of these characters converge for sanctuary—and they offer their own stage for dramas to play out, often involving the mob.

A major theme already present in the first episode is one of independence—particularly among the women on the show. Early in Episode One, for instance, we are introduced to Lori, a new arrival from the Midwest who quickly meets C.C., a pimp who regularly hangs out near Port Authority hoping to snatch up some fresh recruits. C.C. notices Lori; she notices him right back. Instead of some old-fashioned parable at play—a treacly Red Riding Hood story in which the modern female victim is taken in by a big, bad wolf—Lori breaks with convention and admits her intention to work on the street. She only needs the man to take care of her and offer her the protection she thinks she needs.

HBO

But Candy—played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, who also produces—pointedly refuses to work for a pimp, preferring to go about her business alone. "Nobody makes money off my pussy but me," she snaps to Rodney (Method Man), a pimp who attempts to convince her to join his roster of women.

With Candy, Simon and Pelacanos are also playing with—and bending, but not breaking—the classic cliché of the hooker with a heart of gold. She takes a gig deflowering a teenage boy, Stuart, whose friends have pooled their money to initiate his sexual journey, and she eagerly guides him because, hey, a job's a job, and she cares about her performance. He doesn't last long (as to be expected), and despite his immediate intention to finish his part of the deal, Candy turns him down when he admits he doesn't have the cash. He pleads: Can't she give him a second chance? A normal customer would last longer, so how is it fair? And Candy gives him a quick and easy economics lesson.

Candy: What do you do, Stuart?

Stuart: I'm in school.

Candy: What's your daddy do?

Stuart: Sells cars. He's got a dealership.

Candy: That's his job, right? Someone comes in, knows just the car he wants, doesn't dick around, doesn't need a long test-drive, doesn't argue about the color, whatever. Does he give him the car for less? Does he pay less than the guy who comes in, takes forever, gotta drive five or six cars, talk about the radio, the white walls, everything else before he's ready to buy? No. He doesn't give the easy customer two cars for the price of one, right? This is my job, Stuart.

But she relents when he offers a personal check, despite her normal rules. "For you, Stu? You know, I think I would." Heart of gold, after all.

We don't see this kind of tenderness from everyone, of course. One young women, Darlene, has an aggressive john—a man who gets off on slapping her around and can get too aggressive despite her consent. Later, however, an older customer offers her money to simply sit with him, eat pizza, and watch old movies on TV. These women are companions; they fulfill sexual desires—either run-of-the-mill or the kind that can be dangerous. But they also serve their customers by simply being present. The economics of the street means that there will always be some sort of demand for a product, and the women are not just selling their bodies but their identities, supplying whatever their customers are eager to buy.

HBO

Lori, as green as she is, seems to be game for the most old-fashioned gig economy there is. But the question is: Does she need someone to help her do it (in the form of C.C.) or can she go it alone? She has an informational interview of sorts with Candy, who admits that working on the street as a free agent has its benefits as much as it has some drawbacks. And C.C., we realize, isn't some gentle pimp who has an eye solely for his women. He's in business, after all, and he wants to maintain his inventory and keep his women in line. While we see a surprisingly fresh depiction of sex work—Candy's independence, Lori's eagerness—we also see that it's still, like everything else, a functioning tool of the patriarchy. In The Deuce's closing moments, we see how brutal the work can be when C.C. assaults one of his prized women, Ashley, after she comes up short for him.

There's also Abby, an NYU student who has her own form of grift: she's fucking her professor to influence her grades. But we see through Abby's character the importance of privilege: When she's busted for buying drugs in Hell's Kitchen, the cop who picks her up ends up letting her go. And off she rides with Officer Flanagan, who has every intention of taking her home with him, but he only gets as far as giving her his number. Her brief brush with the law is enough of a fall from grace to expose her to the world—and how much she may be able to manipulate it for her own benefit, encouraging her to drop out of school.

HBO

Of course, you can't talk about The Deuce without mentioning its star James Franco, pulling double duty by playing twin brothers Vinnie and Frankie Martino. They are hardly two sides of a coin. Vinnie is a bartender, perpetually down on his luck. He's assaulted by thugs in the show's opening moments, and his marriage is compromised by his wife's infidelity and his own sexual transgressions. Meanwhile, he's easily mistaken for his brother, who has run up gambling debts with the mob. Franco might be the weakest link here—or at least playing two fairly uninteresting characters. One question: How will we keep the Martino brothers apart? Will Vinnie sport a scar from getting pistol-whipped in the pilot episode for the rest of the series? Let's hope so.

So far the Martino brothers exist outside of the various competing narratives. But this is a David Simon show. As we learned on The Wire, everything is connected. Despite the wide geography of New York City, and the multitudes of stories that can take place on one city block, the world of The Deuce is likely to be a lot smaller than it seems.

Tyler Coates Senior Culture Editor Tyler Coates is the Senior Culture Editor at Esquire.com.

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