HBO's much-hyped gangster drama is beautiful to look at, but there's little that is new here
Boardwalk Empire (Sky Atlantic) | skyplayer
The Big C (More 4) | 4oD
Louis Theroux: Ultra Zionists (BBC2) | iPlayer
Welcome to Romford (C4) | 4oD
The opening two episodes of Boardwalk Empire had everything ? sex, murder, dancing girls ? except an original idea. Created by Terence Winter, one of the writers on The Sopranos, the HBO drama series, which launched the new Sky Atlantic channel of American imports, has drawn loud acclaim in the States and boasts several weighty players, led by Martin Scorsese and Steve Buscemi. None of that was enough, however, to prevent its wholesale bootlegging of American gangster classics.
Large quantities of Coppola, the Coen brothers, Brian De Palma ? even Scott Fitzgerald ? have been added to what, underneath all the handsome labelling and lavish packaging, remains a rather conventional narrative blend. It's not easy to come up with something fresh and distinctive in the realm of organised crime. The above names, including Scorsese, who directed the first episode and had a hand in producing the series, have imagined the mafia scene so vividly and extensively that there's little room left for anything but pastiche.
The makers of The Sopranos dealt with that problem by locating the action in the suburbs of New Jersey. They also named the elephant cramping the room by having the characters refer to The Godfather and Goodfellas. Most significantly, they also shifted the main arena of moral struggle from society at large to the warzone of shrink-visiting Tony Soprano's mind. The result was a brilliantly strategic retreat from the operatic frontline marked out by cinema.
Boardwalk Empire, by contrast, is a return to the high style of sumptuous set pieces and simple psychological motivations. Buscemi is Enoch "Nucky" Thompson, a corrupt politician-cum-gangster who apparently ran Atlantic City during the prohibition era of the 1920s.
With his fish-eyed expression and side-of-the-mouth patter, Buscemi is not a natural lead. There's an ironic-cynical quality to his acting, as if Humphrey Bogart was played by Bugs Bunny, that's ideal for carping away from the margins. He wisecracked his way from scene to scene without ever creating the kind of gravity around which the rest of the story could revolve. It's not that, centre stage, he seemed small-time; rather that his edginess made everyone else appear flat by comparison.
In particular, Buscemi's number two, Michael Pitt, playing a kind of Gatsby-before-he-was-Gatsby firebrand, was steadfastly unconvincing as a young war-damaged killer. Pitt shares the same problem of another of Scorsese's recent muses, Leonardo DiCaprio, in that his attempts to seem troubled and interesting are reminiscent of nothing so much as an overgrown 13-year-old who's just been grounded by his mom.
If Boardwalk Empire didn't match up to the advance hype, it was nonetheless a fabulous sight to behold. There were several of Scorsese's elaborate trademark tracking shots and luxuriant compositions, and each button of the wiseguy suits and every polished facade bore the shiny stamp of authentic period detail. The effect was a little like a gorgeous fresco that had been painted by numbers. You could admire the dazzling surface but there wasn't much reason to spend time contemplating what it all meant.
It says something about the current abundance of quality American television that The Big C managed to elude Sky Atlantic's factory-trawler of a net. As she did in the charming film You Can Count on Me, Laura Linney plays a frustrated woman with a young son and a wayward brother. The big difference is that she also has stage 4 cancer.
Advanced cancer can be a cheap shot at instant pathos, and there were worrying signs first of all that this adult comedy-drama wasn't going to do enough to avoid trite insights. But give Linney a halfway lively script and she is a riot of emotional intelligence. The premise is that, liberated by her bleak diagnosis, she gets her "weird back", as her brother puts it, and throws out her self-obsessed husband, challenges her lazy teenager, confronts a difficult neighbour, and informs a spiteful, obese student: "You can't be fat and mean. You can either be fat and jolly or a skinny bitch."
It was fun, in a liberated-from-normal-behaviour way, but you wonder if it isn't destined to repeat itself. That said, The Big C did manage an effective usage of the small c, that four-letter word that's fast becoming the sine qua non of after-the-watershed comedy. There were two in last week's Episodes, a couple of shrill alarm calls in a series permanently set on snooze. Once upon a time they would have raised the dead. Now they can't even raise a smile.
One of the advantages of feature writing is that you get to do things that you might otherwise not do ? for instance, drive a minicab around London or visit fundamentalist Jewish settlers on the West Bank. One of the disadvantages of TV criticism is that, sooner or later, you have to watch someone else do the same thing.
In Louis Theroux: Ultra Zionists, Theroux didn't get any further in penetrating the armour-plated hide of the religious settlers than I managed ? which is to say, not very far at all. There were very few of his familiar gestures ? the sideways look at the camera and so on ? as he grappled with bare-faced arrogance and uncompromising contradiction. But the solemnity was to no avail. He might as well have mugged himself silly for all the difference it would have made.
My own experience suggested that, when they're not grabbing yet more land, the settlers spend their time being interviewed by an endless stream of media. They know all the gambits and, as with all religious extremists, reason and irony are futile. In the unlikely event of a "Louis Theroux: Ultra Islamists", the myopic certainty would, if anything, be even blinder.
"You're an atheist," said one of the settlers, accusingly to Theroux.
"It gives me comfort," he drily replied. In that part of the world, God knows it's the only thing that does.
After all the sacred hatred in the "Holy Land", it was reaffirming to find some profane love closer to home in that secular heaven otherwise known as Romford. Shot with a split screen showing the front and rear of a minicab, Welcome to Romford captured the manic energy and strange intimacy of the urban cab ride on a night out in the outer suburbs.
You could say that there was an element of playing up for the camera, but compared to my own experience as a cab driver, the occupants were positively sedate. At one stage a driver questioned a drunken passenger who was worried that her boyfriend might cheat on her again.
"Trust issues, eh?" said the driver with the weary wisdom of man who's spent too many hours listening to late-night phone-ins. In the end a minicab is much like prohibition in Atlantic City: sober at the front and legless in the back.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/feb/06/boardwalk-empire-big-c-review
Roy Hodgson Mergers and acquisitions Banking Digital media Iain Chambers Supermarkets
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