But in the weeks before the onslaught of new series, I want to mention the second-season return of HBOs “The Deuce,” which had a great first season. Created by David Simon and George Pelecanos, the show comes back on Sunday night at 9 — so if you’re planning to marathon the eight episodes of the first season, get to it. It’s a New York City period piece about the sex industry and the commercialization of desire in the 1970s, and it gives us a large cast of fringe characters, each of whom is written and played distinctively.

You’re about to travel into another TV dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind, a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination and the networks’ wallets. Your next stop . . . the Fall Season.


Maggie Gyllenhaal, as an ambitious self-pimping prostitute who goes by the name Candy, is altogether excellent — but because she’s in a show from Simon, whose superior dramas including “The Wire” have been consistently underrecognized on the awards circuit possibly for being too gritty, she failed to get an Emmy nomination this year. Not great, Television Academy. James Franco, who is fine but not a standout, is back as brothers Vince and Frankie, after HBO reviewed the sexual misconduct allegations made against him and decided to proceed. Ironically, perhaps, the subject of men bullying and mistreating women, now so prominent with the #MeToo movement, is a dominant theme in “The Deuce,” which reveals how little has changed over the decades.

But Candy is the most compelling character. The story line jumps ahead five years to 1977 for season two. She is still pursuing her dream of directing pornos, while remaining circumspect and guarded. Yup, her key to independence and power is helming sex movies. She has to deal with all the rude misogyny in an industry led by white men who only want to see the women they work with onscreen. They’re not used to someone like Candy. There’s a Harvey Weinstein moment, in which Candy must decide whether or not to trade sex for money from a producer.


As you’d expect from a Simon series, we can see various social, criminal, and economic systems interacting and, often, failing. There isn’t a lot of justice for those being exploited by the sex industry, even as porn movies and magazines start to move into the mainstream.

Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @MatthewGilbert.