Just finished the series last night and really enjoyed it as another strong example of Simon’s “the system is the system and has a life of its own despite those who seek to either change it or resist change” genre. I’m not generally a Franco fan, but I didn’t mind him here.
Thanks for the reminder I liked season 1 a lot. I only periodically subscribe to HBO, but with the final season of Silicon Valley out Duece out maybe I should resubscribe too much good TV shows out there and too many good games.
Finally got around to starting The Deuce after having it on my watch list for a good long time. Very much a Wire vibe, unsurprisingly, and some Sopranos notes too. Very much enjoying it through the first few episodes and I expect to like the rest. And considering it’s all about the sex trade, the explicit stuff is reasonably low key.
I will be interested to hear what you think. I stuck with it for a few seasons, but I can’t remember if I watched it all. I found it surprisingly uninteresting! It has all the right elements and pedigree, but somehow it just didn’t come together in a pleasing way for me.
This mirrors my feelings exactly. It was a top notch production with some great acting but I found it… impenetrable. It just left me cold. I kept waiting for it to grab my interest but it never did.
I have completed watching all three seasons of The Deuce and I really enjoyed it. It’s not as focused on the storyline and surroundings as The Wire was, much more about telling the story of the characters who happened to be in the area as NYC tried to clean it up. Which means you’d get parts of lots of stories, but they didn’t really feel completely finished in many cases. But I liked the characters enough that I was OK with that. Well, I say “like”, but for many it was more “enjoyed hating” since many of them are complete asshats. And I thought the ending was perfectly executed.
Having said all that, I can totally understand where @TimElhajj and @draxen are coming from. They jump around a lot and don’t really make clear the big-picture stuff. If your favorite character disappears…or something more permanent…then it would be easy to lose interest.
I struggled with it because I find it really depressing. At least in the first season. Good, though.
Yeah, plus, what happened to the gritty realism from The Wire, where like young, loveable drug dealers were executed by their equally lovable but not so innocent best friends? I can still see the one dude yelling “Where’s Wallace?” and it was such a poignant, heartbreaking scene. Contrast that scene to the one In The Deuce where there is a mob-funded trust that the bar owner and his girlfriend use to fund prostitutes to escape from the city. That was certainly a made-up detail. I mean, I get that they’re trying to make those two characters seem a little more noble, but do something a little more realistic to the rest of the show.