Boardwalk Empire

Terence Winter spent years in the writers’ room of The Sopranos, and Boardwalk Empire is what he made when given a city of his own. The city is Atlantic City in 1920, the week Prohibition arrives, and the man who runs it is Nucky Thompson (Steve Buscemi), the county treasurer, who intends to make more from the ban on drink than anyone ever made from drink. Martin Scorsese directed the first episode. Fifty-five more followed across five seasons, and we recommend most of them, with the caveat that the first season asks for more patience than a crime drama usually dares to.

The first thing you notice is the money on screen. The boardwalk was built rather than borrowed, and the camera walks along it at a stroll, past a fortune teller, a photographer’s booth, a shop exhibiting premature babies in incubators, and the grey sea beyond the rail. Nucky’s hotel suite is dark wood and lamplight, and the men wear suits cut so close you can tell who has been eating well. Scratchy dance-band records play under scenes of men agreeing to kill each other. We sat up at the first tracking shot along the boards, and the set kept doing it to us, which sets rarely manage twice.

Buscemi is an odd choice for a lead and the series knows it. Nucky does not hit anyone. He talks, he pays, he arranges, and he watches, and Buscemi plays the watching as a kind of hunger. It took us three or four episodes to stop waiting for someone louder to shove him aside, and once we stopped, the performance came into focus: a gangster played entirely as a politician, which is what most of them were.

The louder people are around him, and they are a pleasure. Michael Shannon’s Nelson Van Alden is a federal agent who prays over his supper and looks at Atlantic City as if it had insulted his mother. Shannon plays him without a flicker of comedy, which is why he is so funny, and then, changing nothing, he becomes frightening. Michael Stuhlbarg’s Arnold Rothstein drinks milk and speaks in whole paragraphs. Stephen Graham’s Al Capone is a Chicago driver with a big laugh and no patience, and Graham shows you the man he will become without pointing at him. Michael Kenneth Williams gives Chalky White, who runs the Black side of town, more dignity than the first season’s scripts know what to do with. Shea Whigham, as Nucky’s brother Eli, the sheriff, plays resentment as a slow leak.

Kelly Macdonald is the one who got at us. Margaret Schroeder is an Irish immigrant with a drunk for a husband and a baby on the way, and in the pilot she comes to Nucky’s office to ask a favour with a face that has been hit. Macdonald plays the scene with her hands folded and her voice level, and the levelness is the awful part. We were moved more than we expected by a woman asking a criminal for help, and it was her thread that kept us watching when the plot did not.

The plot is the trouble early on. Winter’s writers, who include the novelist Dennis Lehane and the playwright Howard Korder, have New York, Chicago, the federal agents and the ward bosses to keep in the air, and the first season moves between them at the pace of a man showing you round a large house. Some gangster scenes arrive second-hand: the hijacking on a dark road, the table of men who pause before they laugh. The women who are not Margaret are thin. Paz de la Huerta’s Lucy Danziger is Nucky’s mistress and is filmed as one, and Aleksa Palladino’s Angela Darmody is given a life the first season is not curious about.

Most critics placed the first season a little below The Sopranos and The Wire while admiring how it looked, and we would not argue. Where we differ is on what comes after. The series gets quicker and harder as it goes, and the later seasons, which we will not describe, pay for the violence the first only promises. The eight-episode final run is the leanest thing in it.

Watch two a night and do not judge it before the sixth. It is an 18 certificate and earns it, usually in the back half of a season, when the talking stops.