'Last Tango' debuts, 'Boardwalk Empire' returns

* LAST TANGO IN HALIFAX. 8 p.m. Sunday, WHYY12.

* BOARDWALK EMPIRE. 9 p.m. Sunday, HBO.

WHAT COULD be sweeter - or safer - than a show depicting a rekindled romance between two people in their 70s?

Quite a lot, if the show is "Last Tango in Halifax," which makes its U.S. debut on PBS Sunday.

It's not that you couldn't dance this one with your grandparents (or with teenage grandkids, if you are grandparents). But like that other British import, "Call the Midwife," which has worked topics like abortion and incest into its deceptively cozy stories of nurse-midwives in 1950s London, "Last Tango in Halifax" isn't afraid to step on some toes.

Derek Jacobi and Anne Reid star as Alan and Celia, whose mutual teenage crush came to nothing 60 years earlier. Now widowed, they've reconnected on Facebook and, after a very brief time, decided to marry.

Enter their families, who'll add complications, some more comical than others, to this possibly too-simple decision.

But this remains very much Jacobi and Reid's show. And while Jacobi is as wonderful here as he is, well, everywhere, it's Reid who wowed me in her depiction of a woman who's been unhappy for a very long time and who may not be capable of holding on to the happiness now in her grasp.

We've all heard stories of reunions between first loves (and "Last Tango" was inspired by the experience of writer Sally Wainwright's own mother), but we don't usually see people grappling with their inevitable differences so honestly, or acknowledging that while it's possible not to sweat the small stuff, not everything's small stuff.

It says something about how unpatronizingly "Last Tango" treats its lovers that I wondered more than once during the six-episode first season (another's been ordered in Britain) if these two even belonged together. That's the kind of suspense usually reserved for characters with unlined faces and less baggage.

These two have earned theirs.

Nucky Thompson (Steve Buscemi) returns on Sunday as HBO's "Boardwalk Empire" begins its fourth season, but he no longer feels quite so much like the center of the show's universe.

Neither does Atlantic City, which is ceding some of the action to Cicero, Ill., Harlem and even sunny Florida, where peddling swampland was already a thing in 1924. (Oh, and Nucky's nephew's at Temple.)

One location missing from the five episodes I've seen: Brooklyn, where Nucky's estranged wife, Margaret (Kelly Macdonald), is said to be living.

As eager as I am for Macdonald's return, I can't fault the emphasis on some other characters' stories - including Nucky's valet, Eddie Kessler (Anthony Laciura), and nightclub operator Chalky White (Michael Kenneth Williams) - or the additions of Jeffrey Wright, Ron Livingston and Patricia Arquette to a cast that's already one of the strongest in television.

And though I can't say my interest in "Empire" is still on the rise, it hasn't collapsed just yet.

On Twitter: @elgray

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