TV shows we love: Boardwalk Empire

Boardwalk Empire was not only one of the most visually assured series of the past two decades, but in its range and sheer quality, perhaps one of the most ambitious.

We are thrust into an Art Deco metropolis before its inevitable decline; Atlantic City at its height, a lost realm of gleaming hotels, lacquered geometric interiors and prohibition speakeasies.

The whole place hums with the confidence of a country that was young and had God on its side, and the all too familiar presence of tribalism in America’s manifest destiny runs deep.

Into this world steps the infamous mobster come politician, Nucky Thompson, played with austere brilliance by Steve Buscemi.

Buscemi’s performance as a somewhat uncharismatic bureaucrat, which despite many viewers struggled to agree with, was really rather the point.

His ascendence into the world of all corrupting power is hardly heroic, but brutally fatalistic.

Each gain he makes, and each betrayal he enacts carries its own internal erosion of his character.

Old New York is loud and restless, already assured of its own velocity. Havana pulses with heat and vice.

The locations, though undoubtedly gorgeous, never shallowly pursued beauty, and the ugliness of the world beneath the tidy veneer, with all its suffering, is made quite clear.

In scope and narrative density, the show truly rivalled The Sopranos, yet never quite enjoyed the same cultural dominance.

Perhaps because it asked more patience of its viewers and offered no illusions of some eventual redemption.

Ultimately, Boardwalk Empire is a study of excess and corruption, the debt one incurs up the greasy pole and the inevitable decay that follows.

Its story is one of longing, hubris and the knowledge that the more one attains, the more one fears to lose.

As the great late Bessie Smith delivers so masterfully in the show’s score, “nobody knows you when you’re down and out”.