Watch The Deuce if you want a TV meal that moves you to tears

Season Three of HBO’s The Deuce concluded last week and the final episode had me in tears. The David Simon-produced series about Times Square street-life, circa 1976 to present, was yet another smash hit for the former newspaperman. The title comes from the slang reference for 42nd Street and its entanglement of cheap thrills, gaudy entertainment and general depravity. Simon, along with his co-producer George Pelacanos, have already given us The Wire and Treme via HBO, capturing the urban desperation of the Baltimore drug scene in the former and the moldy mess of post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans in the latter. Simon’s detail-oriented productions have a way of drawing you in. Sound design buttresses set design and brilliant location dressings – the whole enchilada is there on the digital platter for viewers to devour. And they do.

The Deuce storylines frequently focused on women – sex workers, pornography actresses, directors, activists, bartenders, diner waitresses and, of course, police and thieves in the streets. The sleaze orbit also includes the usual Mafiosi tropes, a few manly whorehouse bouncers and ratso druggies. But then James Franco enters with his dual-role calisthenics playing twin brothers who run a Hell’s Kitchen club among other sketchy enterprises. And there is a radiant Maggie Gyllenhaal also stealing the show as the former prostitute turned erotica auteur, working across from a heavy-lidded David Krumholtz who gave us a Willie Loman performance as Harvey the wizened, old-school pornographer. The velour-clad cast and supreme art direction made The Deuce high-quality television drama that will be missed, especially by anyone who worked or lived in the Times Square/Hell’s Kitchen neighborhoods of that era.

If you did, it is easy to trot out a laundry list of the precision and accuracy of the images Simon and the rotation of directors put on screen. Notice the overstuffed trash bins, where a detective can barely find space to rid himself of a business card just presented to him by a task force type hoping to clean up Times Square. Hear the decibels of sanitation trucks backing up among car alarms and the white noise of Midtown west. The airshaft windows painted shut. The carpets in overlit foyers are frayed trip hazards. Abandoned furniture is soggy on the curb. The broken wheel of pugilistic Dumpsters sets them askew in front of graffitied loading docks. The more you look, the more you notice the brilliant re-creation of 42nd Street’s nitcomb reality check. I was hoping for at least one reference to the Carter Hotel. It stood in the heart of this district and was known for its hourly room turnovers. If you called the hotel, a gruff female voice would answer immediately: “Carter Hotel. 59!” Room price is important and that is why she leads with that information. Anyone who made that call to the Carter back in 1988, it is safe to say, was probably crying as the final moments of the episode unfolded.

In 1988, I moved from an afternoon newspaper job in Wheeling, West Virginia to New York City because I got hired as a writer for a somewhat wretched trade magazine group based in Times Square. The publishing house was at 1515 Broadway, in the heart of Times Square. I was a kid from the cornfields of Ohio, just out of journalism school. One of my early “lunch hours” found me sitting in a plain booth in the Red Ruby Chinese restaurant on 8^th Avenue between 45th and 46th Street in Hell’s Kitchen. There was an uncomfortable heatwave baking the city. I had to wear cheap dress shirts with awkward neckties. Downtown, there were the Tompkins Square riots and everyone seemed agitated. AIDS was cutting a swath through the creative community of the city. It was the end of Ed Koch’s interminable run as NYC mayor. So I spilled soy sauce on the tabloid headlines at my table in the Chinese joint, that was all red inside with specials scrawled on paper plates riddled with comical typographical errors. Two doors down was an enormous homeless shelter that was gathering media attention as a festering sore of local street crime. The Red Ruby soldiered on with its basic panelling and shellacked wainscoting. I would sit with my then-exotic Hunan lunch among the prostitutes also on their meal breaks. “Lo mein, high times,” one of them said, trying to repair her torn fishnets. Prostitutes in broad daylight! Lo mein! Scallion pancakes!

This was all quite exotic to a lad from the Buckeye state. When I exited the Red Ruby, I always checked the curb for the turnip truck which I apparently fell off of. Some days I was with a sultry Cuban-American bisexual co-worker who would always chuckle as we passed Dykes Lumber on the way back to the Times Square office. She was, of course, from Long Island. The assistant to the publisher, however, was a local kid whose family still has a Greek bakery on Ninth Avenue to this day. His name was Paul, and he was one of only two native New Yorkers in my personal realm after making the move from Appalachia. Everyone else I met was from Ohio. My learning curve, however, was expanding by the minute, and by the stride, through the streets of Hell’s Kitchen. It was amazing to work in that neighborhood. By 1990, I was in a Hell’s Kitchen Irish dive bar with a band of Greek soccer fans who were watching their national team be shut out on three straight games for an early exit from the World Cup. We shared a “steam table” meal with the Greeks who were ashamed at the low quality of not only their soccer team but the bar food.

It was also a neighborhood where I used to spy Sam Shepard and Jessica Lange pushing their children in swings on a tiny sidestreet playground. We were surrounded by classic NYC bars like Dave’s Irish Coffee, Gough’s, Jimmy’s Corner, McHale’s and Rudy’s. These places were frequented by New York Times prepress technicians, Broadway stagehands, off-duty Transit cops, Madison Square Garden ushers, struggling actors, coked up local hotel concierges and various ne’er-do-wells. One guy who was always shooting pool at Dave’s Irish Coffee routinely appeared with his dungaree pockets slashed because he would fall asleep on the subway and thieves would slice his pockets with boxcutters without waking him up and walk off with his wallet. He was the opposite of some of my co-workers who would sprint with their Friday paychecks to the Chemical Bank on 43rd and Broadway and then march over to Tad’s Steaks for a cheap early dinner/reward for enduring yet another week of writing soul-crushingly obscure stories about corporate travel or television commercial production. Some went to the Big Apple Theater across Times Square to see loops of New Wave Hookers and various X-rated cinema, next door to the massive, two-story Nathan’s Famous. Yes, there were hordes of tourists about, but not as many as the throngs presently choking Broadway.

Dare I say I came of age in that neighbourhood, which is now quite Disneyfied and family oriented. This change is well documented, emerging from the edicts of “Business Improvement Districts” hell-bent on “reviving” urban areas. You find these people in any city across America with a seedy waterfront district lit by neon beer signs and glowing cigarette ash. Before long, it is transformed with bike lanes and solar-powered trash cans automatically recycling.

Though I frequented the Red Ruby in my early days in Times Square, I never got to know the help there. That was never my bag as a quiet Midwesterner. Many New Yorkers I met had to know every detail about every person with whom they conducted commerce, as if the familiarity established some automatic trust. The emphasis on a “routine” annoys almost as much as the pedestrian connoisseurship pushed by the whiney soliloquys from the overrated Seinfeld sit-com. Anonymous transactions go a long way, in my book. Which ties in nicely with much of the action in The Deuce. I may not have had the proverbial “cardboard suitcase full of dreams” but I was taught well in journalism school to pay attention to details.

Which brings us to the ghost walk by James Franco that ended the final episode of The Deuce – it  was a bit heavy-handed and certainly not as nuanced as The Sopranos cut-to-black finish that set so many viewers on fire. It name-checked the waves of gentrification that have hit every major city and can set a nostalgia alarm off in anyone who stayed put in a particular urban grid. But seeing Franco wander through the dull ether of multiple Duane Reade pharmacy lights and M&M Store streetscapes is enough to turn everyone into a sentimental New Yorker, with a vivid memory of why Manhattan coaxed so many artists to its hefty sugar-light bosom. I defer to the late New York sports columnist Jimmy Cannon, who earned his journalistic chops absorbing the Times Square milieu well before The Deuce era. He once wrote: “The fog of time conceals the filth of vanished years. Distance donates a bogus tranquillity. Memory holds onto the exciting matters and the pleasant ones. We seemed to always be in motion and on the wing. The nights are never sad in reflection. It wasn’t that way, but the illusion persists.”

That is what The Deuce has reaffirmed, and I cannot thank Simon enough for his artistry.

The Deuce is available in the UK on Sky Atlantic.