When David Simon announces he’s making a new TV series, even the most jaded of critics tend to take notice. Sure, not everything Simon touches turns to gold, but the creator of The Wire has more than earned the widespread goodwill he enjoys: few writers are as comfortable turning difficult, complicated subjects into intricate, heartbreaking TV.
The birth of the porn industry in 1970s New York does not make for the most promising of subject matters. Not only have we been here before in everything from Boogie Nights to the 2004 documentary Inside Deep Throat, but also the last time HBO visited the 70s it was for the big-budget excesses of Vinyl, a show whose multiple failings remain an all-too-vivid memory.
However, if we’ve learnt anything from Simon’s previous work, it’s that he excels at making the unpromising very promising indeed. The Deuce is a cleverly told tale of sex, commerce and the price of power, which works because it looks at the sex industry as a job, with the same problems and complaints as any other.
Thus the street workers trade war stories in a dimly lit Times Square cafe (“Daddies, husbands and pimps – they’re all the same. They love you for who you are until you try to be someone else,” states the tired-before-her-time Ashley), while their pimps sardonically shoot the breeze about “product” while noting that President Nixon is the biggest pimp of all. Everyone here is on the make, from James Franco’s sad-sack Vincent (even his moustache seems to droop despairingly in contrast to that of twin brother Frankie, also played by Franco) to Maggie Gyllenhaal’s entrepreneurial Eileen, AKA Candy, who sees sex movies as her shot at financial freedom.
Such dark subject matter could have made for an extremely depressing series, but The Deuce is vibrant, visceral viewing which frequently takes the most well-worn scenarios – a wide-eyed young girl arrives in the big bad city from the midwest; a young mother visits her child, who has no idea about her real job – and upends them: the girl is not so wide-eyed and has her own ideas about how to survive in New York; the young mother feels no guilt about leaving her son with her own mother – she too has a vision of how to survive.
It helps that Simon has a terrific writing team, including crime novelists George Pelecanos, Richard Price, Lisa Lutz and Megan Abbott. It was Abbott who wrote the series’ best episode, Au Reservoir, which showed us with compassion and honesty that even the most hard-edged characters, such as Gary Carr’s violent CC, were simply scrabbling to survive.
This generosity of spirit is the show’s greatest gift. Where other series use sex as titillation, The Deuce prefers to examine the nature of desire, both fantasy and reality. The sweet-natured Darlene (a wonderful Dominique Fishback) might find her escape in old movies, but she is capable of sharp-eyed savviness when on the job: her silent side-eye to Eileen during the shooting of a porn scene says more than any number of sharply scripted words.
Similarly the show’s bleak finale, My Name is Ruby, highlighted the difference between Eileen – who uses her understanding of fantasy to move behind the camera (uttering the memorable line: “His dick takes us in, if we start on the pussy there’s no story”) – and her friend Ruby (Pernell Walker), AKA Thunder Thighs, who talks a good game but can’t protect herself from the brutal reality of picking a bad john.
The series’ closing scenes, in which street worker Lori looks wide-eyed at a seemingly on-top-of-the-world Linda Lovelace at the premiere for Deep Throat, further highlights that disconnect between starry fantasy and bitter reality. The same goes for a small but telling moment when police officer Chris Alston (Lawrence Gillard Jnr), one of the few people on the show with anything approaching a conscience, realises that any relationship with reporter Sandra (Natalie Paul) will come at the price of his job.
It is its melancholy streak that makes this series so worthwhile. The Deuce might be hard to watch at times but it is also a truly adult drama about the adult film industry: thoughtful, candid, complex and surprisingly warm underneath all that grime.
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