The Deuce - Neglecting David Simon

Somewhere along the line, I'd read that David Simon had never matched the quality of work that he had achieved with The Wire. Rather than take this as unsurpassable praise for the Baltimore drama - in my view, and also the view of many others, the greatest television drama of all time - I somehow allowed this unexamined judgement to fester into an excuse to forgo Simon's other creations. 

I might have benefited from blunting the rhetorical edge to the following questions. What could possibly compare to The Wire's peerless depiction of the city-society and the way that each of its components connect and, crucially, begin to resemble each other in their power-hierarchies and codes: politics, gangs, family, blue collar and white collar industries, schools, and, of course, the 'POH-LICE'? What could come close to the glorious gangster-subverting drama of the character of Omar Little? Where could I find the kind of jaw-dropping television served up by the deaths of Stringer Bell, D'Angelo Barksdale, and most heartbreaking of all, the execution of teenage drug dealer Wallace? Indeed, why bother with stuff that isn't going to compare with that? I took these questions as statements of fact and what a ridiculous mistake that proved to be.  

But then I was waylaid by a discreet review of the final season of The Deuce. The detail that reeled me in was that each season - three in all - featured theme tunes by Curtis Mayfield, Elvis Costello and Blondie. I dug out episode one and decided to give it a go. Even before Curtis had finished telling me 'not to worry', and that 'if there's a hell below, we're all gonna go', I was hooked. 

It is hard-hitting and savagely entertaining television. Tracking the rise of the porn-industry against the back-drop of, first 1970s, and then 1980s New York, you follow the lives of a group of sex-workers, pimps, bar-workers, police, journalists and small-time mafiosi, as they go about their business in a world of bars and nightclubs, peep-shows and porn-sets, hotel rooms and saunas.  

We watch New York, particularly its seedy underbelly in and around Times Square - 'the Deuce' - begin to change, with mayors and their largely corrupt subordinates exercising power. The public rationale is to clean up the city; the private motivation, as always, is money. No easy answers are offered up, certainly in the case of the porn-industry and sex workers: when the pimps are removed from the equation, can it be empowering for women, or, is their always a damaging psychological price to be paid? Tentative conclusions to that conundrum are hinted at in the final season. Most powerfully and poignantly, the shadow and then the devastating impact of HIV and AIDs on the city's gay community are also handled brilliantly. 

1972

It has only minor flaws - an occasional slip of the tongue regarding dialogue, such as one character uttering a snatch of anachronistic office babble: 'going forwards' (such a rare misstep for Simon and his usually pitch-perfect co-writer George Pelecanos). And just occasionally, it can sail too close to the sentimental. Although part of me will always argue that if your trade is social realism you need to make room for the sentimental.     

But to return to the impossibly high-bar that Simon set himself with his magnum opus. Was there anything that The Deuce was doing differently to The Wire? One of the things that I found vague in the latter, perhaps intentionally so, was at which point in recent history particular moments took place. Wider, historically seismic events in the world were largely absent, and temporal bearings could only be sought by referring to the technology that was in vogue amongst the drug-gangs: call-boxes, pagers, and then disposable mobile phones or 'burners'. In The Deuce, you can pin down the year exactly, and I loved that.

1978

One such moment, fleeting yet striking, sums up the genius of this show. It's a beautiful vignette of understated period detail. Deep into Season Three, sex worker Melissa and her gay best friend Reg, the latter slowly dying of AIDs, are in conversation. An incapacitated Reg needs something to wash down painkillers. Melissa goes to grab him a glass of water but Reg ushers her towards the kitchen cupboard and to a stash of Coca Cola cans. "I hoarded this stuff", says Reg, and immediately you pick up on the reference. It's spring 1985 and an embattled Coca Cola, losing ground to a Michael Jackson inspired Pepsi, have foolishly - although some argue deliberately - tinkered with the flavour of their classic drink. A nation is outraged. Yet the world and its 'blown out of all proportion' minor worries carries on apace against the background of the real tragedies that are unfolding. It's also seamless - compare it to the grand joint marketing exercise that Coca Cola and Stranger Things 3 carried out last year, reintroducing 'New Coke' back onto the market in special limited edition can. 

1985

The Deuce is saturated with this attention to detail, be this through music, brands, cinema - Reg, a film-costumer sends Melissa to stand in for him on a movie about a Australian man who is new to New York -, food, and technology - I love the way that Maggie Gyllenhaal's Candy paces around her apartment as she listens to her answer machine messages (in my adult life I only had around eighteen months of doing that before mobile phones and the internet rendered it redundant). For me, in this particular temporal aspect, it surpasses The Wire. 

I am, of course, now feeling slightly guilty about the neglect that I've shown for David Simon's other creations. Yet, looking at the reception that The Deuce got from the wider public - although the critics certainly seemed to have loved it - I'm clearly not the only one who has not been paying attention. For the last two years everyone has been talking about Succession - a fantastic piece of satirical television, no doubt about it - but why not The Deuce, certainly more nuanced and perhaps more ambitious than Jesse Armstrong's show. Maybe the porn-industry - and I should stress that this is just one aspect of a multi-faceted storyline - is much more of a turn-off than the world of a Machiavellian media mogul and his infighting family? And The Deuce certainly doesn't flinch from exposing flesh - of all genders - and portraying sex in its many guises. Perhaps some viewers found this unsettling.  

Whatever the case, the scales of scepticism have dropped from my eyes. So whereto next? I am already halfway through Simon's latest project, an adaptation of Philip Roth's reimagining of the fate of American Jews under an anti-Semitic president, The Plot Against America. It is superb. Curious, too, in that this is one of my least favourite Roth novels: certainly an odd complaint, in that I found the brutal rupture taking place in Roth's typical Jewish New Jersey universe, both jarring and terrifying, which was absolutely Roth's point. Simon's portrayal of this world, visual and therefore removed from the milieu of Roth's steady prose, is startling and fresh. And like The Wire and The Deuce, it is astonishing television. Which all bodes well for my next road-trip with Simon, down towards New Orleans and Treme. What's been keeping me?