If nothing else (and there’s plenty else), The Deuce, premiering Sunday on HBO, gets midtown crudball New York in the 70s dead right.

It specifically nails the early 70s, when the corruption and cynicism of the Nixon Watergate scandal infiltrated every pore. Other recent 70s-set series—Vinyl, the coke-driven dive into the music biz that was canceled after one expensive season by HBO, and I’m Dying Up Here, Showtime’s docudrama about the L.A. comedy scene that coughed up David Letterman, Jay Leno, Robin Williams, Andy Kaufman, Richard Pryor, and Elayne Boosler—poured the period-recreation production values on slick and heavy, but both came across as processed facsimiles. The wigs rested on the actors’ heads like birds’ nests, and everybody looked too actory-healthy (flawless skin, toned bodies) for their scurvy, scraping-by, desperate characters. Even the wrist action in the way the casts smoked looked too studied and self-conscious.

But The Deuce, nicknamed for the chunk of Times Square teeming with pimps, porn shops, prostitutes, dirty cops, and a supporting army of lowlife degenerates oozing daily out of Port Authority bus terminal, lifts the giant manhole cover over the district and drops us in. The filthy streets jaundiced by neon light and strewn with discarded mattresses and torn newspapers, the movie marquees touting Mondo Trasho, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, and Duck, You Sucker!, the graffiti spreading everywhere like malignant calligraphy, the car honking and shouted curses—everything looks so palpably real that you might get a fungus just watching the show. (Feel free to quote me, HBO.)

The series begins in 1971, the year that Pauline Kael published a famous review of The French Connection in The New Yorker called “Urban Gothic,” which explored the cinema-fication of Manhattan as “New York-made movies have provided a permanent record of the city in breakdown”—movies such as Klute, Little Murders, Midnight Cowboy, Shaft, Cotton Comes to Harlem, The Panic in Needle Park, and Woody Allen’s Bananas, not to mention the films that director Sidney Lumet had in store. “There’s a sense of carnival about this urban-crisis city; everybody seems dressed for a mad ball,” Kael wrote.

The psychotic violence on the screen was mirrored by the psychotic violence on the streets and vice versa, the air inside and outside the theaters hovering with stabbing menace. (A couple of college students in The Deuce are overheard debating over whether to catch a late showing of Play Misty for Me or Straw Dogs.) And in 1971, we’re just at the starting gate of Sodom and Gomorrah on the Hudson. (I arrived in New York a year later, just in time for the full festivities.) The first glimmer of Times Square’s renewal and redemption wouldn’t be seen until 1975, when A Chorus Line opened on Broadway. But even then, Kael’s apprehensive vision still held—that it was impossible to look around and picture the streets ever being clean again. Now that the streets are clean and Times Square is a mall replica of itself, that era is missed and eulogized, and it’s more than nostalgia peering through a grimy rear window.

All that danger and survival-mode know-how charged the city with a rude, drumming energy, friction, and make-do attitude that incited a creative upsurge in dance, music, art, journalism, and personal expression unmatched since. The action came from the ground up, and The Deuce runs a superb ground game. Created by crime novelist George Pelacanos and David Simon, with a debut episode directed by Michelle MacLaren, a second by Ernest R. Dickerson, and writing by both novelist Megan Abbott and Richard Price, poet laureate of police argot, the result is a first-class operation about a community of low-class operatives.