Boardwalk Empire: The Complete Series (HBO, Blu-ray, DVD) opens with Nucky Thompson (Steve Buscemi), the treasurer of Atlantic City and the man who runs the town — and the graft — from behind the pose of public service, toasting the U.S. Congress and the new possibilities that the twenties will bring, thanks to the utterly disastrous “noble experiment” known as Prohibition. Everything changes from that moment.
Created by The Sopranos writer/producer Terence Winter, based on the book by Nelson Johnson, and co-produced by Martin Scorsese (who directs the pilot episode), Boardwalk Empire is a lavish period drama that chronicles the birth of the modern organized crime syndicate, built on the fortunes made bootlegging liquor and running illegal imports of the real stuff from out of country. Nucky isn’t a gangster per se, merely a thoroughly corrupt politician with his fingers in everything and a gift for keeping a harmonious balance, but the competition for territory by rivals pushes him to more violent methods, and more volatile partnerships: Arnold Rothstein (Michael Stuhlbarg of A Simple Man), Lucky Luciano and a young Al Capone among them.
This is a grand canvas of characters, both real and historical, with the quasi-fictional Nucky (based loosely on real life Atlantic City treasure Enoch “Nucky” Johnson) as the low-key power broker at the center. Many come and go but a few remain through to the final seasons: Kelly Macdonald as poor Irish immigrant Margaret who is widowed by Nucky and later becomes his wife; Shea Whigham as Nucky’s brother Eli, who remains steadfastly protective of his family but turns on his brother and who gets smarter about the way things work as the series goes on; Michael Kenneth Williams as Chalky White, Nucky’s opposite in the black community of Atlantic City; Michael Shannon as Treasury agent turned mob gunman Nelson Van Alden; Jack Huston as disfigured war veteran Richard Harrow, a gunman by trade but a man of conviction and loyalty; and Gretchen Mol as Gillian Darmody, a dancer grooming her son to become the protégé of his biological father, the political Godfather of Atlantic City.
As the series continues, it expands focus to take in the growth and consolidation of organized crime in New York (under Rothstein, Meyer Lanskey, and Luciano) and Chicago (Capone), while Nucky fights off challenges to his control, and the fifth and final season jumps ahead to 1931, when talk of ending Prohibition in the air starts the bootleggers on a scramble to stake a claim in the legal booze trade. The advice given to Nucky in the first episode of the series—”You can’t be half a gangster”—rings through this season. But for Winter, the turning point isn’t anywhere in 1931 but back in Nucky’s formative years (seen in flashback in the final season), learning how power is flexed and what is sacrificed to attain it. Winter saves Nucky’s original sin for the final episode, his Rosebud of sorts. It doesn’t explain all, of course, but it adds another dimension to Nucky’s efforts at any kind of redemption.
A lot of characters come and go but among the most interesting are Dabney Coleman as The Commodore, who runs the Atlantic City political machine; Bobby Cannavale as ambitious Sicilian bootlegger Gyp Rossetti, who tries to muscle Nucky’s bootlegging operation away from him; Jeffrey Wright as Harlem power broker Valentin Narcisse, who runs his criminal activities beneath a façade of social works; and Patricia Arquette as Florida speakeasy owner Sally Wheet, who partners with Nucky to helps him set up a new liquor pipeline from the Caribbean.
It’s a magnificently mounted piece of television centered on a fabulous recreation of the old Boardwalk (built in Brooklyn as a standing set and extended / filled out via the magic of CGI). But for all the grand production values (the period recreation and visual texture is amazing and almost worth watching in its own right), it’s one of HBO’s less flamboyant spectacles and it constantly brings the violent business back home to show just what it does to the individuals and families involved.
The individual seasons previously released individually are collected in a box with the same commentary tracks, featurettes, and other supplements from the original release. Nothing fancy as far as packaging is concerned, which is refreshing. Exclusive to this set is a bonus disc with new featurettes. The longest and most engaging is the half-hour “The Final Shot: A Farewell to Boardwalk Empire,” which looks back in the show’s development with executive producer Martin Scorsese (who also shot the debut episode), creator/executive producer Terrence Winter, actor Steve Buscemi (Nucky Thompson), and other members of the creative team.
The rest of the featurettes don’t run over eight minutes apiece: “Anatomy of a Hit” looks back at a few key scenes and “Visual Effects” looks at how digital effects were melded with the sets. Shorter are “Building the Boardwalk,” “Shooting the Series” (on creating and maintaining the show’s distinctive look), and “Designing the Series.”
Dancing on the Edge (PBS, Blu-ray, DVD) – The name Stephen Poliakoff doesn’t mean much to American TV and movie fans but in Britain he’s an acclaimed playwright and writer / director of original dramas on both the big screen and small screen. The five-part mini-series Dancing on the Edge follows the fortunes of a black jazz band in 1930s London as their success fans the flames of racism as a wave of nationalism rises among the wealthy sympathetic to Germany’s Fascist government and white supremacist policies. The meeting of show business drama and political commentary is complicated when the band’s singer is assaulted and dies from her injuries and the band’s leader (Chiwetel Ejiofor of 12 Years a Slave) is set up to be the prime suspect. Matthew Goode (The Good Wife) is a music journalist who promotes the band through his magazine and the superb cast features Janet Montgomery, Jenna Coleman, John Goodman, and Jacqueline Bisset.
The mini-series appears at times to be a period murder mystery but Poliakoff defies the conventions to focus on character drama, withholding the expectations of a plot neatly wrapped up with a tidy revelation of guilt to offer a more complex world with hints of conspiracies and shady business dealings, corrupt aristocrats protected by money and the code of the secret society of Freemasons, and a culture where racism runs as deep in high society as it did in America. It’s a damning portrait of the English upper classes of the 1930s balanced by the loyalty and commitment of friends who pull together to help out one another in the face of great risk and enlivened by swinging soundtrack of small group jazz and dance music. Though officially a five-part series, a sixth episode is presented as a postscript that delves further into the lives of the band members and explores the culture of racism the white characters never imagined existed. A superb drama with an eye-opening look at an aspect of British history rarely examined. Blu-ray and DVD with no supplements.
Broadchurch: The Complete Second Season (eOne, DVD) – Both critically acclaimed and hugely popular in Britain, the original Broadchurch was produced a single, stand-alone mini-series but it became so popular that a second season was ordered. The creators made it work by beginning where the original series left off: the confessed child killer (Matthew Gravelle) up for arraignment while the town tries to put the events that almost tore the town apart behind them. But when he enters a plea of not guilty, the subsequent trial reopens all the wounds as it drags the secrets and lies exposed in the investigation out into open court. As an ambitious barrister (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) takes his case for the publicity value, battling her former mentor (Charlotte Rampling) come out of retirement to prosecute the killer, police detectives Alec (David Tennant) and Ellie (Olivia Colman) get involved with an old case that nearly ruined Alec’s career.
The procedural aspect is interesting enough (though these copes bend the law so much that it’s a wonder their cases ever stand up in court) but it’s the character drama that sustains the show: the anger, the sense of betrayal and injustice, the suspicion of neighbors that once trusted each other now polarized by the revelations of their secrets. As with the first season, the town itself is a character and the effects of the crime still reverberates through what was once considered a tight, familiar community. British TV veterans Jodie Whittaker, Andrew Buchan, and Eve Myles co-star, and rising star James D’Arcy is the primary suspect in the unsolved murder that Alec revives. Well written, with strong characters and vivid performances, this British TV drama at its best.
Eight episodes on DVD, with two featurettes and a number of brief cast interviews.
Welcome to Sweden: The Complete First Season (eOne, DVD) is the bilingual sitcom from Greg Poehler (brother of Amy Poehler, who also produces), who draws the premise from his own life. He plays celebrity accountant (as in accountant to the celebrities) Bruce Evan who leaves his job and his life in New York City to follow his girlfriend Emma (Josephine Bornebusch) back to her home in Sweden and finally meet her family. The series, created by Greg Poehler and written by Poehler and Bornebusch, is a European co-production picked up in the U.S. by NBC for a summer run and Amy Poehler is both an executive producer and a co-star, playing herself, Bruce’s most demanding and persistent former client.
From an American perspective it’s your basic fish-out-of-water comedy, with Bruce as the not-exactly-ugly-but-certainly-self-centered American, but the series gives equal time to the Swedish characters and, given the Scandinavian side of the creative partnership, avoids the usual Swedish stereotypes in its portrait of Emma’s eccentric family. Lena Olin is the show’s international marquee name and terrific in the role of Emma’s mom, while the Poehler connection brings in a line-up of American guest stars, including Will Ferrell, Aubrey Plaza, Malin Akerman, Jack Black, Paul Simon, and others. It’s the kind of comedy that meshes with the low-key character humor of The Office and Parks and Recreation, and while Greg Poehler, a neophyte as both performer and writer, isn’t quite as natural as Bornebusch, a Swedish star with impeccable English and solid comedy chops, he’s just fine as the American abroad negotiating the cultural obstacles of an almost passive-aggressive politeness while failing to pick up even the rudiments of the language. 10 episodes on DVD
Orange is the New Black: Season Two (Lionsgate, Blu-ray, DVD, Digital HD) sustains the quality begun in the first season while spreading out as an ensemble series even more that in the first season. It opens with Piper (Taylor Schilling) called to testify in a drug trial and getting herself into trouble by remaining loyal to the old girlfriend (Laura Prepon) whose drug-dealing get her in trouble in the first place. Because as good as Schilling is as the privileged upper-class girl in stir, the show’s strength is in the breadth and depth of the entire cast, and the compassion that it brings to the most damaged characters, and in the observation of how this close society works. 13 episodes on Blu-ray and DVD, with commentary on two episodes and four featurettes, plus bonus Digital editions of the season for both formats (it’s Digital HD for Blu-ray).
The third season begins on Netflix in June.
Glee: The Final Season (Fox, DVD) wraps the one-time hit musical series with an abbreviated 13-episode season that brings Rachel (Lea Michele) and Kurt (Chris Colfer) back to McKinley High to save the arts from the new principal, Sue Sylvester (Jane Lynch). Along with other returning characters, there’s a new group of singers and rival groups. Also available is the box set Glee: The Complete Series (Fox, DVD).
Out of curiosity I dipped into CPO Sharkey: The Complete First Season (Time Life, DVD), an unlikely candidate for rediscovery. Notable mainly for casting Don Rickles as a career Navy officer, this 1970s peacetime service sitcom is an otherwise unmemorable show that only comes to life when Rickles lets his brand of insult humor loose on the culturally diverse group of new recruits he’s charged with training—Polish, Puerto Rican, Jewish, streetwise African American, Japanese, etc. It gives Rickles the opportunity to lay on his ethnic slurs (suitably toned down for TV), but the seemingly hard-bitten Chief Petty Officer Sharkey is a softy at heart and each episode he calms down for a heartfelt moment of generosity or compassion.
Rickles plays the part big and broad, pulling cartoonish faces as he plays the bulldog of a drill sergeant for his nervous recruits, and co-star Peter Isacksen was surely cast as his junior officer purely for this tall, gawky, drawling character to tower over the diminutive Rickles. The show lasted for two seasons, and Rickles fans aside, there’s little reason to revisit the series. The show was shot on videotape and the limitations of the technology are apparent in the fuzzy, smeary image. 15 episodes on DVD, with a bonus clip from “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson” visiting the set of the show.
Calendar of upcoming releases on Blu-ray, DVD, Digital, and VOD
