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Jonathan Storm: Costly 'Boardwalk Empire' is richly rewarding

Where to start with Boardwalk Empire, the magnificent, sweeping, wildly expensive series from The Sopranos top writer Terence Winter, by way of director Martin Scorsese, which premieres Sunday at 9 p.m. on HBO?

Buscemi (left) with his mistress, Paz de la Huerta. In Prohibition-era Atlantic City, the boss makes sure the liquor continues to flow.
Buscemi (left) with his mistress, Paz de la Huerta. In Prohibition-era Atlantic City, the boss makes sure the liquor continues to flow.Read more

Where to start with Boardwalk Empire, the magnificent, sweeping, wildly expensive series from The Sopranos top writer Terence Winter, by way of director Martin Scorsese, which premieres Sunday at 9 p.m. on HBO?

How about in 1920, when the show opens, an exciting, postwar moment when the country was on the verge of unprecedented social change and economic prosperity, women were on the doorstep of universal suffrage, and the days of instant news, via radio, were beginning?

Behind it all was Prohibition, which started Jan. 16, 1920, transforming millions of ordinary citizens into criminal accessories and giving ordinary criminals the opportunity to rise to extraordinary financial heights- and the motivation to sink to extraordinary moral depths in pursuit of all that money.

Boardwalk Empire opens the day before Prohibition, in Atlantic City. Built up in a swamp at the end of some rudimentary dirt roads, but located on an ocean and bay that were superhighways for rum runners, the "World's Playground" was a world unto itself.

And Enoch "Nucky" Johnson, the Atlantic County treasurer, was its king.

Fishing from a few pages in a 100-year history of A.C. by Nelson Johnson, also called Boardwalk Empire, Winter says he found Nucky Johnson (no relation to Nelson) irresistible and pulled out all the stops of authenticity in creating an incredibly detailed 1920 snapshot of the city.

He has peopled it with historical, fictional, and fictionalized characters to tell stories that, even more than The Sopranos did, glory in the wild times while examining universal themes. Where The Sopranos was intimate, Boardwalk Empire is expansive. Its visual rewards compensate considerably for its lesser emotional impact.

At the center is Nucky Thompson, a fictionalized version of Nucky Johnson. "I thought we had enough real people on the show that I was beholden to their reality," Winter says, explaining the Nucky switch. "Our Nucky can do anything and veer off into any directions."

The real people include Al Capone; Lucky Luciano; the shadowy Arnold Rothstein, who was the biggest criminal of the time; and a host of politicians and such entertainers as Eddie Cantor and Houdini's equally slippery magician brother, Hardeen.

It all swirls around Nucky, played by what at first seems an unlikely choice, but was Winter's and Scorsese's only choice, Steve Buscemi. The slender, bug-eyed character actor rises stunningly to the occasion, inhabiting Thompson's fancy clothes and multifaceted personality with aplomb.

Plagued by a generous side and a desire to be liked, Thompson will be ever-so-slightly troubled as his garden-variety corruption - political favors, payoffs, extortion - quickly deepens, while his heart is touched by a beautiful Irish immigrant with an independent streak. Buscemi, never at odds with displaying punctiliously violent, sometimes psycho, power, handles the softness and subtlety beautifully.

And, surprisingly, he looks great in those suits. Everybody looks great in their clothes, many of them vintage, others made from natural fabrics that were the only ones available at the time.

"We were absolute fanatics about using accurate fabrics," said costume designer John Dunn, "and we were very vigilant about not letting anything contemporary slip into our show. . . . I think that's really important to be accurate in order for the viewer to really sink into the piece."

Sinking into the period is worth the price of admission alone, just as it is with AMC's Mad Men, but with Boardwalk Empire, you sink in and almost suffocate, deliciously so.

In just one scene in the first episode, scores (not the 10 or 15 you're used to seeing in big-deal TV shows) of revelers on Prohibition eve swirl through Babette's Supper Club, all dressed in that expensive stuff - don't forget the hats, gloves, jewelry. Watching is like being in a time machine.

The demanding Scorsese, an executive producer who purportedly reads and comments on all the scripts, directed only the 75-minute pilot. HBO says it cost about $20 million, seven to 10 times the cost of the usual big-ticket TV series. Almost every frame glows. Things get only slightly less lush in the subsequent 11 episodes, with the budget easily rivaling the $120 million to $150 million that the network spent on each of the 10-part, Tom Hanks World War II mini-series, Band of Brothers and The Pacific.

Boardwalk Empire, conceivably, could run 100 episodes or more, right through the 1929 stock-market crash.

HBO says that more than 200 actors have speaking roles in the show's first season, augmented by about 1,000 extras.

The authenticity extends to the $5 million exterior set, a scaled-down copy of the Atlantic City Boardwalk, built behind a storage yard in Brooklyn, and the interior sets. Chalk up another 100 or so properly dressed extras every time the Boardwalk makes the screen.

And the cars! Johnson, for instance, famously cruised around Atlantic City in a powder-blue Rolls-Royce limo. And there on the screen is what certainly appears to be a 1919 powder-blue Silver Ghost.

The network, which takes in north of $4 billion a year, can afford it all. HBO needs the extravagance and attendant big-ticket publicity to entice American subscribers, but it also makes a pile from overseas sales. There's almost no American entertainment topic more attractive in foreign markets than 1920s and '30s gangsters. The graphic violence and naked bevies of bodacious babes (not to mention a few dudes) that pass freely on premium cable translate into every language. HBO has sold the show in more than 150 countries and expects Boardwalk Empire to outpace all its other series in foreign sales.

It may have more dead bodies, but the show is less viscerally violent than The Sopranos. It also has more live naked bodies. Twelve ukulele players responded to a casting call for a topless courtesan who could strum the once-popular instrument, and Paz de la Huerta, who plays Thompson's nuclear bombshell girlfriend, Lucy Danziger, must be saving producers some costume money. She seems happiest in her birthday suit.

Lucy will battle Kelly Macdonald's Margaret Schroeder, relatively new to our shores and displaying an immigrant's fortitude, for Thompson's heart and bankroll.

Other key fictional players in this drama that touches most of the bases - love, lust, loyalty, ambition, status, greed, power, responsibility - include World War I veteran Jimmy Darmody (Michael Pitt), a Thompson protege who's hungry for the big time; Prohibition agent Nelson Van Alden (Michael Shannon), who may be crazier than the lot of 'em; and Chalky White (Michael Kenneth Williams), bigwig among the A.C. African Americans, most of whom work in the fancy hotels and are a crucial voting bloc supporting Thompson.

Most of the actors are well-traveled but little known. Though you might recognize Williams as the chilling Omar Little from The Wire, you might not recognize Gretchen Mol, playing a somewhat mysterious chorister with a special relationship with Thompson, and, if you hadn't read it here, you would never have recognized Dabney Coleman as "Commodore" Louis Kaestner, a fictionalized version of Louis Kuehnle, who ran Atlantic City before Nucky Johnson and was said to be his mentor.

Though "I Found My Love in Avalon," which makes it into one episode, refers to California's Catalina Island and not the Shore community that's cooler by a mile, Empire does offer some lagniappe to residents of the Philadelphia region and New Jersey.

The road through it may be dark and dirty, but the 1920 border of Hammonton is still decorated with a "Blueberry Capital of the World" sign. In a classic scene of on-the-lam medical treatment on the roundabout route between A.C. and New York City, a Raritan Township dentist gets impressed into service to keep an injured crook alive.

Though Thompson palavers with a North Jersey politico about getting some roads built from Philadelphia and New York to his empire, work didn't begin on the Garden State Parkway, the New Jersey Turnpike and the Atlantic City Expressway until 1946, 1950, and 1962, respectively. Before that, the railroad was the primary route to A.C.

Johnson's palatial digs at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel (he rented an entire floor) may be gone, but power brokers are still dining at the Knife & Fork Inn, which opened in 1912 and is mentioned in one episode.

All these details mingle with midget boxing matches, a 25-cents-a-look baby incubation storefront ("Nature's Little Weaklings"), complex bootleg operations, and scads of other oddities, at least by today's standards, to create an exotic, long-ago place that's a vacation to visit.

Boardwalk Empire combines them with themes of the times - emotionally disturbed war veterans, ethnic intolerance, women's status, political corruption and incompetence - that resonate today.

In so many ways, it's as good as television gets.

Jonathan Storm:

Television

Boardwalk Empire

Premieres at 9 p.m. Sunday on HBO