The Deuce: Season 1

The bad:

• This poster. (Blech.)
• The journalism arc - just like how it was bad in The Wire, coincidentally enough.
• This show doing that whole "the entire first season is the pilot, really" thing where, you know, the entire first season is the pilot.

The good: literally everything else.

Here's David Simon's latest, a show set in the early 1970s in New York and focused on the decline of street prostitution and the rise of pornography, and how the two were related. It's got James Franco (twice over! as twins!), it's got Maggie Gyllenhaal, it's got like half a dozen actors from The Wire at least, and it's just really very good.

I want to highlight, in particular, the design work on this show. I don't know how much is CG, I don't know how much is real sets, but holy crap does this thing look and moreover feel like the dirty, dingy, disgusting 1970s. Everything is brown, yellow, beige. There's wood paneling everywhere. Every white guy's got greasy hair and big-ass lapels. Almost every black character, male or female, has as afro. It's just a grungy, nasty-looking show - exactly the way I picture dirty-ass whore-riddled 1970s New York. Just phenomenal.

Sounds like the plan here is a three-season arc with big temporal gaps between seasons. This first season was, "here's how it was, here's how it starts to change." The second season will take place in the late '70s and will likely deal with some backlash to that change. Then the third season brings us to the mid-'80s with the VHS industry finally taking off, and "porn in movie theaters" disappearing altogether. Works for me! It's probably too much to hope for an epilogue set in the early days of the Internet, but isn't that the logical endpoint for a story about porn?

Anyway, this show is, without thinking twice about it, easily in my top ten for the year thus far. Time to start thinking long and hard about that list, though.