Boardwalk Empire Season 3 Thread - "Margate Sands" SEASON FINALE

[jhawk826]

Looking forward to seeing how Gillian's and Harrow's reaction to Jimmy's death.

As far as what? She and Harrow were already resigned to the fact that he was going to his death when she had that talk with her grandson.

 

[futuremd]

Looking forward to seeing how Gillian's and Harrow's reaction to Jimmy's death.

As far as what? She and Harrow were already resigned to the fact that he was going to his death when she had that talk with her grandson.

I got that feeling...but I don't understand it. Like is that something thats honorable?

It seemed to dramatized. 

Who just goes off to their death like that?

 

[macbk]

That new trailer, looks like the show hasn't lost a step .

 

[thegoogler]

Can't wait! Hope Nelson brings more lulz this season

 

[imasoleman18]

READY

 

[rawex5]

 

[imasoleman18]

 

[big j 33]

AV Club's episode by episode walkthrough with the creator Terence Winter

http://www.avclub.com/articles/boardwalk-empire-creator-terence-winter-on-raising,84239/

By the end of its first season, the HBO historical drama Boardwalk Empire  had developed a reputation as the best show that nobody reallyloved. It won awards, drew decent ratings for cable, and was obviously a well-acted, well-written, well-directed, and painstakingly researched show, but Boardwalk Empire  hadn’t inspired the kind of fanatical devotion that attended the likes of Mad Men, Breaking Bad, or The Sopranos—the show that many people expected Boardwalk Empire to be, given that creator Terence Winter had been one of the mainSopranos writers. But by the end of Boardwalk Empire’s second season, a real buzz began to develop, not necessarily because the show significantly improved—it was always high-quality—but perhaps because viewers grew more accustomed and attached to Boardwalk Empire’s enormous cast of characters and ambitiously sprawling plot, right around the time that  Winter and his writers raised the stakes for both.

Boardwalk Empire’s second season begins in 1921, with the show’s protagonist, Atlantic City Treasurer Nucky Thompson (based on real-life politician Enoch Johnson, and played by Steve Buscemi) dealing with pressure from dangerously repressed Federal Prohibition agent Nelson Van Alden (Michael Shannon) and a coalition of friends-turned-enemies that includes his old mentor Commodore Louis Kaestner (Dabney Coleman), the Commodore’s formerly estranged son Jimmy Darmody (Michael Pitt), and Nucky’s own brother Eli (Shea Whigham). In Nucky’s corner: his live-in girlfriend Margaret Schroeder (Kelly Macdonald), though she has moral qualms about their arrangement, and about Nucky’s shady political dealings. Meanwhile, the mob bosses in New York—from the elegant Arnold Rothstein (Michael Stuhlbarg) to the more thuggish Lucky Luciano (Vincent Piazza)—are trying to decide whether to ally with Nucky or to follow The Commodore. The season follows this frequently violent power struggle, and weaves in dozens of other colorful characters, including upstart Chicago gangster Al Capone (Stephen Graham), the head of Atlantic City’s black community Chalky White (Michael Kenneth Williams), quirky Ohio bootlegger George Remus (Glenn Feshler), righteous Philadelphia mob boss Manny Horvitz (William Forsythe), scarred WWI vet/assassin Richard Harrow (Jack Huston), crusading US attorney Esther Randolph (Julianne Nicholson), and more.

Creator Terence Winter joined The A.V. Club for a detailed discussion of the show’s second season, which arrives this week on DVD and Blu-ray, in advance of the third season (which debuts Sunday, September 16.) In part one of four, Winter discusses the first three episodes, beginning with “21” and concluding with “A Dangerous Maid.”

“21” (Sept. 25, 2011)
A KKK attack pushes Chalky to threaten Nucky with a race war, though Chalky doesn’t yet know that The Commodore is working behind the scenes to have Nucky busted for election-rigging. Meanwhile, Van Alden shows his wife around a city that he claims to be keeping safe from sin, while keeping her away from the dingy apartment where he’s stowed his pregnant showgirl mistress Lucy Danziger (Paz de la Huerta). And Jimmy turns his back on Nucky, the man who helped raise him, so that he can stand with his real father, The Commodore.

The A.V. Club: How much did you think about reintroducing this world and these characters at the start of the new season?

Terence Winter:  Well, you always have to assume that certain people are going to be coming to the show for the first time and have no knowledge of anything. My assumption is that most viewers are coming back, but there’s a certain amount of reintroduction needed for them as well. We benefit greatly, as do a lot of cable shows, from the “previously on” segments. That really does help remind people what came before, and also if there’s anything specific that they might want to be reminded of to help them enjoy or understand an episode. You can’t rely only on that, though. Some people watch the show on DVD or in other forms that don’t have that benefit, so the episode itself has to have enough information and set-up that people will know what they’re watching.

Montage is a great device to do that, to visit in with a lot of different people. Early on, I knew I wanted to come into the season with this song. We went out of season one with the song “Life’s A Funny Proposition,” and then we come back in with this song “After You Get What You Want You Don’t Want It,” which is sort of thematic for a bunch of our characters. It was an organic way to convey a lot of information in a very short period of time, very visually.

AVC: That song could pretty much serve as a theme for any of the of the show’s characters to start the season. Jimmy especially.

TW:  Pretty much, yeah. Nucky and Margaret, too. It’s like the whole idea of them ending up together while there’s this dissatisfaction in their relationship as well. He’s still out carousing; she’s home alone. The song really applies to everybody, I guess. [Laughs.]

AVC: Did you find the song yourself or do you have people who look for things like that?

TW:  I don’t remember. I think I did find it myself. I float around a lot on YouTube; it’s an amazing resource for all kinds of stuff. I could just spend hours floating from one thing to another. You type in one thing and you’ll get one song that begets 50 other things, and then you click on one of those and there’s 50 more. Just type in “1920s music,” which I’ll do, and sort of bounce around, looking at the titles, thinking, “Oh that looks interesting; maybe I’ll listen to that.” There’s a very famous duo from the 1920s named Van & Schenck that did a lot of comedy songs. The first one I heard was a version of this that they did and I thought the lyrics were terrific. The same thing for “Life’s A Funny Proposition.” I got that from YouTube, just bouncing around. It was almost like a spoken-word record, and I think that the version that I actually listened to may have been George M. Cohan himself. He wrote “Life’s A Funny Proposition.” And people send me things. We have an incredible music supervisor, Randy Poster, who’s done movies with Marty [Scorsese] and is just incredibly talented. He actually just won a Grammy for a soundtrack album. He sends me stuff all of the time.

AVC: It’s an interesting cultural era that you’re covering because there is, as you mentioned, a lot of documentation. There’s some audio around, and plenty of photography around. Probably very little film, though.

TW:   Yeah, unfortunately it was a little before the era when people thought to save that stuff, which is just mind-boggling now when you think of how much of the first 30 years of cinematic history just went into the ****can just because it wasn’t taken seriously. What we wouldn’t give to have all that lost footage. So many films from the era are gone. I’ve just found a bunch of silent-film stills in a thrift shop in Brooklyn that we can’t identify because… well, one of the conclusions we’re coming to is that the film doesn’t exist anymore. Nobody knows who these actors are, what these scenes are. They’re really cool images; it’s just that nobody can identify them.

AVC: There are several specific cultural details in this episode, some of which are clearly purposeful and some of which may just the result of good research. It’s always fascinating, for example, to see what people eat in the past, and here Van Alden goes out to dinner and orders steak, turtle soup, coffee, and cold buttermilk. 

TW:  [Laughs.] Yeah, I love that too. We have an episode coming up in season three called “Spaghetti And Coffee.” I remember watching some old gangster movie from the ’30s and at a diner this guy orders “spaghetti and coffee,” and I went, “Oh my God.” [Laughs.] I mean, they drank coffee with everything. You’d go into a diner, they’d make coffee and a ham sandwich. People always had a pot of coffee on. Whatever these people eat, coffee’s always involved. And then, Van Alden is just… He doesn’t do anything normal. It’s always got to be a little bizarre, y’know? Turtle soup, mutton chops. [Laughs.] That’s always fun for me.

There’s a restaurant in New York that used to be called Keen’s Chophouse for like, a hundred years, and with the dawn of the Internet they changed it to Keen’s Steakhouse, because they thought people would Google “steakhouse” and it wouldn’t come up in the search. That really bummed me out, because you always see these places with their steaks and chops—and their specialty is actually mutton chops. Whenever I can work with old-timey food, I always try to.

AVC: The next specific cultural reference is The Kid, the Charlie Chaplin movie that is contemporaneous to the period but also works in terms of what this episode is about. Is that something you consciously considered?

TW:  Yeah, absolutely. First and foremost, we try to stay true to the era. There have been instances where there have been songs or films that I wanted to work in that just didn’t work for the date, which was heartbreaking. Two years ago there was an Eddie Cantor song that I wanted to use and we thought the date was 1920 but was actually 1928, and it broke my heart because I was just so set on this song. But we try to make sure it makes sense for the period. And then, thematically, I just wanted something that would resonate with this episode and the Chaplin thing came up and I thought, “Well, this is perfect. This is exactly what they may have gone to see.” And it just speaks to the idea of Nucky taking care of this little boy.

AVC: You follow up on that idea with the scene where Nucky gives Jimmy a little father-and-son statuette, which Jimmy later puts up on a shelf in his closet—effectively putting away his father-son relationship with Nucky. Do you worry whether those kinds of images might be seen as too on the nose?

TW:  It’s always a balance. You hope that it’s at least a little subtle. Nucky was sensing throughout the course of the episode that there was an estrangement, and he even calls Jimmy on it. Jimmy talks about when they used to go out shooting. They reminisce on the porch of the funeral parlor and talk about the old days, at a different time in their relationship, which Jimmy wishes he could go back to, especially knowing what is about  to happen in their relationship. The **** is going to hit the fan, and Nucky is going to be arrested. The statue that Nucky gives Jimmy is sort of a reminder of that: a very carefully chosen gift for Jimmy from the man who used to be his father figure. In that sense, I felt we could get away with it because it wasn’t just an accident. Nucky purposely chose that statue to send a message to Jimmy that, “Don’t forget who your friends are. This used to be us.” And of course it’s so painful for Jimmy that he can’t even look at it. He needs to put it away in the closet and hide it because it’s too much of a reminder of his betrayal. 

AVC: This episode also introduces George Remus, who always refers to himself in the third person—a character trait shared by the actual Remus. But what about the stinginess? Was the actual Remus such a penny-pincher?

TW:  That’s a character trait we added. It’s not so much his  stinginess as Nucky’s. He was upset that Nucky was sort of knocking him around over a phone bill. It’s setting up the idea that he and Nucky don’t necessarily get along. We needed a bone of contention between these two guys, so we decided it was something money-related. Really, Remus was a fairly lavish spender, as is Nucky for the most part; but you know, we all have our quirks. I love the idea that these two men who’ve got millions of dollars have a relationship that’s affected by something so petty as, “You charged me for a phone bill when I came as your guest.” This is a long-standing grudge between these two guys and it’s just based on nothing. Just nonsense.

AVC: And they’re about to drive three or four different cities to war over it.

TW:  Absolutely, exactly. Probably bigger things have happened for a lot less.

AVC: Going into the second season, where there any things in particular that you were looking to improve?

TW:  Well, obviously—or maybe not obviously—we were really happy with how this first season turned out. I mean, the first season of any show is a crapshoot, in the sense of wondering how much the audience is connecting to the show, how much they’re understanding, which storylines they like or don’t like, etc. Not that any of that necessarily affects how we do the show, but you’re really sort of inventing this thing from the ground, just hoping it makes sense, y’know? [Laughs.] That said, by the end of the first season, we were really happy with the template of the show, the tone of the show. We were also in a unique situation because we essentially took over the show from Martin Scorsese, who wasn’t going to be continuing to be a part of the show after directing the pilot. It was really up to Tim and Pat and me to continue to replicate what Marty had established visually every week, so that had its own set of challenges.

To answer your question though, I wouldn’t say so much “improve.” We wanted to continue what we had laid out in season one, in terms of the types of stories we were telling and the way we were telling them. We don’t really do a lot of stand-alone episodes. It’s obviously a huge canvas and a huge cast and a lot of interweaving storylines, and we were happy we pulled it off in season one to our satisfaction, and seemingly to the audience’s as well. Season two has its own sets of challenges, because you’ve laid the groundwork and introduced everybody, and now you’ve got to continue the stories you’ve set up, and also you can start digging deeper into all the characters.

“Ourselves Alone” (Oct. 2, 2011)
Jimmy Darmody visits New York, where Lucky and Meyer Lansky (Anatol Yusef) pitch him on the idea of distributing heroin in Atlantic City. Nucky and Chalky both end up in jail, but while Nucky gets sprung, Chalky has to stew, and finds himself challenged by political agitator Dunn Purnsley (Erik LaRay Harvey). But Nucky doesn’t have it much easier, as he returns to his home only to get hassled by visiting Sinn Féin representative John McGarrigle (Ted Rooney), who demands money for the cause and in exchange loans Nucky his rakish enforcer Owen Slater (Charlie Cox).

AVC: The title is a rough translation of “Sinn Féin,” correct?

TW:  Yeah, that’s where we came up with that.

AVC: Obviously titles are not arbitrary on this show. At what point in the development of an episode do you come up with them?

TW:  It’s always different. Sometimes before we even start writing, once we have an outline and we know what the episode’s about, the episode title pops out. Other times, we’re about to lock the episode, it’s edited, and I still don’t have a title, and we’re wracking our brains. This show in particular has been easier for me to come up with titles for episodes for some reason. Sometimes it’s a reference to something somebody’s watching, or reading. “21” was the year that the show takes place. Sometimes in the writers’ room, someone says something and we think, “Gosh that would be a good title,” and sometimes that sticks.

AVC: Was the IRA actually involved in the politics of Atlantic City?

TW:  Well, they certainly were on fundraising missions throughout the United States, so we felt comfortable surmising that they very possibly headed to Atlantic City to raise money there, especially among prominent Irish-Americans who may have been sympathetic to the cause and could write a big check. So Nucky would serve as maybe one of those guys. And we had already set up in season one that there was this big St. Patrick’s Day dinner, and that there were definitely people in the city that were very pro-Ireland, and might be apt to give money.



AVC: The way the character John McGarrigle is introduced is very telling. He delivers this almost hectoring lecture about his need for money, which is an odd tone to strike: shaming somebody and begging at the same time.

TW:  That’s just a way to broaden the character rather than having him be straight down the middle. On the one hand he has this almost open disdain for America and Americans, even though he knows that he needs them very much. Seeing him play against Margaret was really fun. That episode and that character were really created almost completely by [writer] Howard Korder. He did a terrific job.

AVC: The scene ends with him taking a drink, after earlier shunning the idea of drinking alcohol, which is something that happens again and again in this season: this sort of hypocrisy, where people take very stern public stances and then in private just do their own thing.

TW:  Y’know, it’s really hard to live by these sort of manufactured, somewhat arbitrary laws. It’s almost doomed to failure. Prohibition, as Ken Burns pointed out in his documentary, made criminals out of ordinary people. Suddenly things were against the law that most people had been doing all their lives, and were going to continue to do. Suddenly everybody was breaking the law. You’ve got to take this public stance that’s against your private beliefs. It’s like premarital sex. These absolutes are just doomed to fail, y’know? You’re setting yourself up for disappointment if you say, “I will never do X.”

The great tragedy of Van Alden’s life is that the poor guy, he lusts. He has feelings. He’s petty, he’s angry, he wants to drink, he wants to sleep with some girl he meets, and he’s just so tormented over all these very human emotions that it just sort of unravels the guy.

AVC: The Burns documentary you mentioned ran right before season two started. Do you think that it was a help toBoardwalk Empire, raising awareness?

TW:  It definitely brought us publicity. And him as well. We actually did a joint publicity luncheon right before both of our shows came on the air, season two and his documentary, within weeks of each other. But it was just a really happy accident. His thing was in development long before even ours was, and we were working completely unaware of each other. I think we were probably done with season one when I heard that he was working on a prohibition documentary. As it turned out, a lot of the stuff in our season two happened to big parts of Ken Burns’Prohibition. George Remus, for one. And our Esther Randolph character is based on Mabel Walker Willebrandt. Just incredible things that looked like we lifted right out of their documentary, when our film was already in the can by the time we were even aware that this thing existed. 

AVC: Nucky makes a joke to the press in this episode about Trenton, which is a big part of his public persona: cracking stale jokes. Are these jokes historically researched?

TW:  Not necessarily. I mean, a lot of them are old cornball jokes. It’s challenging sometimes, because a lot of them are corny and flat. They’re funny because they’re not funny. It’s a creative decision to say, “I know by modern standards this isn’t funny, but this is the type of joke someone would tell.” You’re sort of laughing at it, not with it. But to give these guys a more modern sense of humor would feel phony to me. We’ve written things that sound more like a contemporary take on the situation, and you get wary of it sometimes. It feels too modern. So in a way, a lot of Nucky’s jokes and humor fit the period.

AVC: There are two strong setpieces at the center of the episode—Jimmy meeting with the New York gangs and Chalky in prison—that might’ve been even stronger if they’d each been one long sequence, rather than being cut up and woven into the rest of the episode. At any point during the writing and editing process did you think, “Maybe we should just stay in one place until this one story is done?”

TW:  We do think about things like that, but I mean, the rhythm just doesn’t really work very well when we’ve tried it. And a lot of this is just done my gut. I’m watching and I’m feeling like I haven’t seen Margaret in a while, or haven’t seen Nucky in a while. As much as you’re engaged with a particular storyline, it just starts to feel like the balance is off. I’m sure it could be done, it’s just really a question of whether or not ultimately I feel or [director] Tim Van Patten feels or Howard Korder feels that it’s working. For us, the better balance is to cut back and forth between storylines. Some episodes of The Sopranos  that we did leant themselves more to what you’re describing. “Pine Barrens” would’ve been a good example, having these guys out lost in the snow. You could stay a long time with them. But even in that episode, we cut back and forth to Tony, and you know, there’s a Meadow storyline as well.

AVC: “Pine Barrens” gets cited sometimes as an example of a bottle episode, but it’s not.

TW:  Yeah, not at all, actually. It’s got a lot of other stuff going on. I always wanted to do a bottle episode on The Sopranos  where everybody gets stuck at the Bing in a big storm and starts reminiscing. Usually bottle episodes are like the clip shows where someone goes, “Oh, do you remember the time… ?” and then they show the clip from whenever. But I’d want all the things they’d reminisce about to be things we’d never seen before. As if they were reminiscing episodes that never existed.

AVC: Community  did that, actually.

TW:  Oh, they did? Oh, that’s great! That’s awesome, I’m glad that somebody did; it’s a good idea. 

“A Dangerous Maid” (Oct. 9, 2011)
A depressed Lucy gets a cheering visit from her old pal Eddie Cantor (Stephen DeRosa), while Margaret gets news from a detective agency about the whereabouts of her Irish relatives. And Nucky and The Commodore wage their cold war on multiple fronts, trying to lock down business alliances and present at least the illusion of power. Finally, the two men meet, by accident, at Babette’s Supper Club, where they have a public shouting match. 

AVC: The title comes from a musical by George and Ira Gershwin. How did you find that particular piece?

TW:  Well, we knew we wanted a play that may have been in Atlantic City, or about to begin on Broadway. A lot of times they would do trial runs in other cities, Atlantic City being one of them. So in the research, that was one of the titles we came up with. I believe it might have been our writer Itamar Moses who found that.

AVC: And you bring Eddie Cantor back from season one. How did you decide to portray Cantor as you did, because the Cantor in this episode appears to be always in a performing mode, even when he’s just chatting casually with Lucy?

TW:  We read a lot about him. We also watched The Eddie Cantor Story, which is like, this Technicolor biopic from the ’50s, and is just hilarious for all the wrong reasons. Eddie Cantor said himself that it bears absolutely no resemblance to his actual life. But for the most part, from what we’ve been able to tell, he was very much “on” all the time. He is kind of performing for Lucy. He’s trying to cheer her up. He’s kind of that guy. I think as the series goes on, I would like to see more of him, a more human side, in the sense of seeing him dropping the act a little bit. He actually, in the crash of ’29, lost everything from what I understand, and had to I think solicit money from his friends in Hollywood to stay afloat for a couple of years. And he had been absolutely one of the most successful performers ever, up to that point. He really got wiped out.

AVC: We see Lucy nude and pregnant in this episode. Was that a prosthetic or a digital effect?

TW:  A bit of both. She wore a prosthetic belly and we cleaned it up a little around the edges with some digital technology. But she looks great. I mean, it’s just incredible. I’m still amazed at what we can do on a computer. It’s just mind-blowing. I mean, Harrow’s face being first and foremost. It’s just astounding. Or even the extension of our boardwalk set, which if you’ve ever seen pictures of what our set looks like, it’s a 300-foot set built in a parking lot in Brooklyn, and suddenly after the computers are done you’ve got the Atlantic Ocean and the thing goes on as far as the eye can see. We go from that down to something as simple as just getting rid of the seams on a prosthetic pregnant belly. 

AVC: You probably couldn’t do this show maybe even 10 years ago.

TW:  Yeah, I mean, the special effects have really made the difference from being able to do this and not do it. When I wrote the pilot, I actually thought, “This is impossible. There’s no way we could ever afford to build Atlantic City circa 1920, this whole boardwalk empire. You have to see the boardwalk.” Then I was watching John Adams  on HBO, and they did a behind-the-scenes segment and I saw what they did. I couldn’t believe what was possible with CGI. They showed these before-and-after shots and I thought, “Wow, we might actually be able to pull this off.” We hired the same company, and here we are.

AVC: There’s a very tender scene between Margaret and Nucky late in this episode, where she’s in bed and he comes home and is getting ready for bed. The moment really makes their relationship seem genuine, and not just one of convenience, as it was before.

TW:  Right. It was really nice to finally see them as a couple. We wanted to explore what was behind their initial attraction. It was a really strong moment for her at the end of episode two when she steals the ledger back for him, and is sort of really protective of him. Then this episode, we internally used to refer to it as “How Nucky Got His Groove Back.” You come into it and he’s really depressed. The world is closing in, all the people closest to him are against him, and there’s this tremendous ****-storm, and the little thing that gets him going again is The Commodore getting the last lobster when Margaret, his girl, wanted the lobster. That’s the thing that finally gets him able to stand up and fight for himself: protecting her, in a way. That gets him re-energized again, y’know, “**** these guys.” [Laughs.]

AVC: Knowing that you’re building to that scene at Babette’s, in the writers’ room do you say, “Okay, we need a scene between Margaret and Nucky earlier in the episode, to establish their relationship?”

TW:  Again, it’s sort of like making soup. You put the outline together, and then with the episode it’s a little bit of adding a dash of this and a dash of that. The scene you’re describing, we’re also setting up the idea of her family being in New York, and her already being a little depressed. So there’s a little bit of setting up that story, and also starting to give Nucky the ammunition he needs. He comes into the scene, Margaret is clearly sad, something is bothering her. He tells her he’s taking her out to dinner, and then another disappointment is heaped upon her and that’s the scene that finally… y’know. So we were constantly building toward it in a way, reinforcing that ending and also giving her a legitimate reason to be upset, that would then actually set up a later storyline. She’s upset about her siblings, who she hasn’t seen in years.

AVC: The scene at Babette’s with Nucky and The Commodore and the lobster is one of the key scenes of the series. Some viewers at the start of season one were expectingBoardwalk Empire  to be more like The Sopranos, in that it would be more about criminals killing each other. And this particular scene establishes that it’s not so much about crime as it is about politics. This is a political war, not a gang war, and that means the characters can’t just start shooting each other.

TW:  Actually, in going through the possibilities for season two, we said, “All right, all these people are conspiring to bring Nucky down, and Jimmy’s got this friend who can put a bullet in a person from a mile away. Why don’t they just kill him?” [Laughs.] Well, that’s it for season two! So obviously it can’t just be, “We’re going to shoot you,” then, “We’re going to shoot back,” etc. It’s got to be something deeper. Because Nucky is involved in politics, and because of the history that we had set up with The Commodore having gone away for election-rigging—which was actually based in reality  as well—we thought, “Ah, this is great.” It’s an election year, so this is a political coup, and not a shot has to be fired. It actually worked out for Jimmy, too, who’s a little on the fence about wanting to go with this plan in the first place. It’s a lot easier to rationalize. “Well, Nucky gets sent to jail; no harm really. He’ll get out. He’ll be fine.” For our purposes, dramatically, it gives a lot more to do than just, “We shoot you.” That kind of thing gets boring really quickly.

Check back tomorrow for part two, which will cover episodes four through six, from “What Does The Bee Do?” to “The Age Of Reason.”

“What Does The Bee Do?” (Oct. 16, 2011)
Richard takes off his tin mask and allows his scarred face to be sketched by his buddy Jimmy’s artsy wife Angela (Aleksa Palladino), while Jimmy’s showgirl mother Gillian (Gretchen Mol) performs a sexy dance for The Commodore, right before he’s stricken with a stroke. Chalky has an uncomfortable dinner party with his daughter’s cultured, light-skinned boyfriend. While at a wild party at the Ritz, Nucky’s lawyer gets the idea to push his client’s election-rigging case to the federal level, where Nucky’s White House connections may be able to help. Jimmy makes promises he can’t keep to Manny Horvitz, a butcher with a rigid code of business ethics. And Agent Clarkson (Joel Brady) investigates what Agent Van Alden is doing with all the agency’s confiscated bootlegger money, and gets himself blown up in the process.

The A.V. Club: This is the first episode of the season that didn’t air on the same night as a new Breaking Bad.

Terence Winter:  I was not aware of that. That was probably good for us.

AVC: It seemed that interest in Boardwalk Empire  kind of built throughout the course of the season, maybe because people who had been watching Breaking Bad  went looking for another smart, violent show to watch on Sunday night.

TW:  Yeah, very possibly.

AVC: Is that something you pay attention to? The numbers?

TW:  Not really. I mean, only if they’re dramatically different. But for the most part, they’re pretty steady. Things get so skewed by, y’know, a football game or the Grammy awards or any number of things. You could drive yourself crazy if you try to figure it out. For us, the end-of-the-week number is more important, and as long as essentially the same number of people are watching every week, however it racks up in terms of when  it’s airing is fine. I mean, my own viewing habits are… I don’t think I ever watch anything  when it’s actually airing. [Laughs.] So, just using myself as a barometer. It doesn’t mean I’m any less interested in the thing I’m watching; it’s just that I don’t have the time to sit down and do it when it’s on.

AVC: Do you try to keep up with the big shows that are on the air right now?

TW:  I try, but I’m so far behind, it’s just pointless. Everything I watch is at least a year old. I did, for some reason, watch Downton Abbey. Well, I know what the reason is: My wife watched it. [Laughs.] And I was even still behind on that, but we did end up watching the whole thing. But yeah, for the most part I’m catching up with things on TiVo. I remember years ago, coming in to work talking about The X-Files, and people were like, “What are you talking about?” I said, “It’s a great show! It’s really cool!” And they were like, “Yeah, five years ago.” [Laughs.]

AVC: “What Does The Bee Do?” has a nifty visual motif: the half-face. There’s Richard of course, but also Agent Clarkson getting half of his face blown off at the end of the episode, and the episode actually begins with The Commodore suffering a stroke and half of his face being paralyzed. Was this intended? 

TW:  If I wanted to seem like we were better filmmakers, I would say that it was a motif, but honestly, no. [Laughs.] That was a coincidence. But maybe there are no such things as coincidences and we are all geniuses and it was a motif. It had not occurred to any of us while we were doing the show, though.

AVC: The Commodore was ill through most of season one, and then just when he seems strong again at the start of season two, he gets incapacitated again. When you’re working with an actor as accomplished as Dabney Coleman, is he fine with the idea that he’s going to be difficult to understand and practically immobile for the better part of two years?

TW:  [Laughs.] He was really excited to play it. He thought it was great. He loved the idea that he was so weak and had formally been this robust guy. And his favorite thing was being slapped by Gillian. [Laughs.] I mean, he thought that was awesome. He’s been tough guys and he’s been ******* bosses and all those things, but from an actor’s perspective, this is something that is different for him and comes with its own sets of challenges, and he was totally on board with it.

AVC: The scene with Gillian’s striptease at the beginning of the episode is very sexy, and then you have a scene later at the Ritz with lots of half-naked people around. This is the first episode of this season that could be described as “risqué,” whereas in season one, you had a lot more nudity. Was there a conscious effort to tone it down?

TW:  We’re conscious of it occasionally, but really, it’s what’s organic to the episode. A lot of the nudity in season one involved Lucy, which was organic to her character, while in this season because of her pregnancy and her situation, it didn’t really lend herself to that—although we managed to see her naked and pregnant a few times. [Laughs.] I never really look at an episode and go, “We need more **** and *** in here. Let’s come up with a scene where we get somebody to walk through naked.” Y’know, it is a show about gangsters and showgirls—and prostitutes on occasion—and you’re going to see those people naked sometimes. 

AVC: That’s a topic that comes up a lot when people talk about HBO shows—that the nudity is “gratuitous.”

TW:  Those charges have been leveled at us, and again, particularly with Lucy. But there’s a scene with Lucy and Margaret at the dress shop in season one where she forces Margaret to dress her and gets naked in front of Margaret, and y’know, that’s not at all gratuitous. This is all this woman has. This is her power: her body. And she’s trying to intimidate Margaret, basically saying, “Look at me. Look at this. You will never have this. You can’t compete with this.” She tries to give Margaret an assessment of herself. Margaret of course won’t have it, but that’s who Lucy is. That’s how she uses her powers. So, to hear people call that “gratuitous,” to me, that’s not understanding what the scene is about.

AVC: This episode also introduces Manny Horvitz, who plays a major role for the rest of the season, and presumably will continue on into season three. He’s not specifically based on any one historical figure, is he?

TW: No, he’s our own invention.

AVC: Why Manny Horvitz, and not his major rival in Philadelphia, Waxey Gordon, whois  historical?

TW:  Well, Gordon was, for the most part, a bootlegger, and I don’t know that Waxey was as crazy-violent as we wanted to make Manny. The other thing too is that I try to veer away from real historical characters as much as I can, because you’re sort of beholden to their reality. Waxey Gordon had a trajectory that may or may not fit with where I might want to take a fictional character. And I’m always worried that the audience is thinking ahead of the story. When Deadwood  was on the air, once I realized that all these characters were based on real people, the first thing I did was Google everybody. [Laughs.] And then I knew everything about all these characters and it kind of ruined the show for me because whenever Al Swearengen would get into trouble, I’d say, “Well, I know this guy doesn’t die until the 20th century, so he’s going to be okay.” And then I said, “****, I shouldn’t know that. And I bet David Milch doesn’t want me to know that.”

So when we started this, I changed Nucky’s last name from Johnson to Thompson, because I didn’t want people saying, “Oh, Nucky never did that. Nucky never killed anybody. Nucky never…” whatever. So our Nucky, he’s based on Nucky Johnson clearly, but he’s not Nucky Johnson. He’s our own guy. Obviously, Capone, Luciano, Rothstein, these guys you can’t **** with in terms of their history. We all know what happens to them. But I can give them relationships with fictional people, so long as it makes sense and is true to the spirit of who they were. Manny is a good example. It could’ve been Waxey Gordon, but then I inherit all of the stuff from Waxey Gordon and that might not really work for me. This guy is a clean slate, and can be whatever we want him to be. 

AVC: If you Google “George Remus,” that guy has a very interesting story—

TW:  Oh yeah, he could be a series unto himself. It’s incredible, really. What a character.

AVC: —and as with Remus and the phone bill, you’ve done some interesting things with Arnold Rothstein. In this particular episode, you have the scene where he’s practicing saying Nucky’s name before he picks up the phone, so that he’ll sound confident and in charge; and you also have him eating apple bread to soothe his poor digestion. So it’s possible to create a character within a historical context.

TW:  Yeah, to humanize them by giving them certain traits, or just to peel back the layer of who these people are. That’s one of the great things you’ll get out of a series as it continues. You get to spend more and more time. You get to give half a page to Rothstein and his wife, just to see somebody as powerful and as in control as Rothstein clear his throat and practice saying what he’s going to say, so you go, “Oh ****, this guy is insecure, like everybody.” The real Rothstein apparently subsisted almost exclusively on cake and milk. Like, he just ate cake all day. [Laughs.] I had his wife chastise him for just a little moment, to show the family side of this guy. 

AVC: One possible historical inaccuracy in this episode, though: Jimmy makes a reference to buying Creamsicles, which may not have existed in 1921, according to the Internet.

TW:  I thought we had… damn. [Laughs.] If I’m remembering correctly, I think we came up with that the Popsicle  had been introduced at the right time, and I think I just said, “Close enough. I’m going to run with that, and see if anyone calls us on it.” And of course you did, so we may be busted.

AVC: This sort of thing is obviously not that important, but at the same time, presumably you don’t want to create something so anachronistic that people are taken out of the reality of the show.

TW:  Well, it’s funny, sometimes we can’t even decide, because there are things that existed back then that seem  anachronistic. Like, they had wire-mesh fencing. I remember one time on-set, our set designer had put this wire-mesh fence, and I said, “God, it just looks too modern.” We just ended up taking it out, because even though it existed, it was one of those things that was just visually jarring. It just feels like 1965 to me. Even expressions… you have a hard time believing some of the things people said back then that feel modern. 

AVC: Nucky says “jerking off” at one point in one of the episodes, which is an example of that.

TW:  I think he said “jacking off,” but sure, either one, yeah. We do have a researcher who calls us on every little thing, and I’d say we have a pretty high percentage of accuracy.

“Gimcrack And Bunkum” (Oct. 23, 2011)
Memorial Day in Atlantic City brings fresh corpses. Eli, unnerved that Jimmy and Gillian have taken charge in the wake of The Commodore’s stroke, sheepishly comes to Nucky for help, but the two of them start punching each other instead, and Eli lets his residual rage spill over later as he beats one of his business partners to death. Jimmy gets a stern talking-to from the city’s elder statesmen—including the mysterious Leander Whitlock (Dominic Chianese)—and Jimmy gets even by scalping one particularly impertinent old man. Richard, however, escapes the grave when he’s interrupted by a hunting dog while in the middle of preparing to shoot himself.

AVC: This is one of the bloodier episodes of this season.

TW:  [Laughs.] A real crowd-pleaser.

AVC: Much like with the nudity, do you have any discussions in the writers’ room along the lines of, “Okay, at this point in this season, we need a little violence?”

TW:  No, it’s just the way it rolled out. We didn’t look at the first four and say, “This feels soft. We need something wild.” It was just that as things heated up for Eli and Jimmy, both of them had to wrest control of their own lives, and this is how it ended up. Eli came apart at the seams, and Jimmy needed to make a very dramatic statement.

AVC: You have all of these dead people popping up on Memorial Day, a day to honor the dead. You use holidays very purposely throughout the run of the show. Is there a storytelling advantage to that?

TW:  Well, it’s a good way of grounding the show in a season, or a particular month. It also provides a good framework for an episode. I mean, it’s always been interesting for me to see how people celebrated holidays way back when, but it’s also a good clothesline on which to hang events, and a good excuse for characters to get together. It’s a good excuse to have parties, which are always fun on the show. And if it happens to be organic to things that are happening, then it works even better. I mean, Memorial Day’s great, because Jimmy’s a veteran, and also they were beginning construction on the Atlantic City war memorial at that time. So we thought this would be a great way to introduce that, and see the beginnings of it, and also this dedication and this statue force all of our characters who have been avoiding each other into the same space, because of political reasons. All of these people have to confront each other, whether they want to do that or not. 

AVC: This is a great Richard Harrow episode: one of his biggest moments in this season, as he goes off to the woods to kill himself. Given the kind of show this is, and given that you’re on cable, you don’t have necessarily the same strictures that you have on the broadcast channels, not just in terms of content, but also in terms of the storytelling. In other words, there’s a real possibility that you could have killed Richard in this episode, which must be a real gift to you as a storyteller, knowing that you can bring the audience up to a point where they honestly do not know whether a character is going to survive.

TW:  Well, at the end of the season they’re really  not going to know. [Laughs.] But, yeah, that is true. And we certainly considered it. Everything’s on the table, for sure. 

AVC: This is the first big episode for Dominic Chianese, whom you previously worked with on The Sopranos,  where he played Uncle Junior. It’s interesting, though, that you have him quietly in the background of some of the earlier episodes, almost unrecognizable.

TW:  He speaks very briefly in episode two, as Eli’s hanging up the phone after calling up Nucky and saying, “How does it feel to be alone?” Dominic gives a toast in Latin. He is hard to recognize without those Uncle Junior glasses, though. He’s almost a high-school teacher. He can play Clark Kent and Superman; it’s really incredible.

We brought him in earlier just to have him inhabit the world. It always bugs me as a viewer when suddenly there’s something new that’s supposed to have been a major presence in the other characters’ lives for years. It’s like some bad sitcom. “Oh, it’s time for my weekly band practice!” Y’know, the band that you’ve never known the characters had for the six prior years of the show. [Laughs.] And now you just have to accept this, like, “Oh yeah, they do this every week, we’ve just never shown you. The same goes with introducing a character. It’s always better to pepper, for me. I love to see somebody peppered in a few episodes, if you know in advance they’re going to come up later.

We did that, actually, with the Russian who gets lost in the woods in The Sopranos. This whole episode was about this guy who worked for the Russian gangsters, so I remember I lobbied David Chase. We were filming a scene a couple of episodes prior where Tony visits the Russian mob boss, and I said, “Can we put the Russian who gets lost in the woods in that scene, just to see him?” Just for the audience to go, “Ooooh, okay… that  guy.” We saw him sweeping the floor in that episode, just so people would know that this guy was in this world beforehand, and now there’s a situation involving him.

Same thing with Dominic. He doesn’t just pop up. You see him for the first time in “21,” at the funeral parlor, where Jimmy goes off to talk to him. I wanted to start layering him then so that when he does become more regular, then maybe you’ve noticed him, maybe not, but if you go back and watch the whole season, you go, “Oh yeah, he’s there.”

AVC: Having Steve Buscemi as your lead allows you to spin some wonderful comic moments out of nothing, and a primary example of that comes in this episode, where he rolls his eyes while putting on a little golfing hat.

TW:  [Laughs.] Yeah, I remember at first, when he came home from the golfing match and had the fight with Eli, I scripted that he was still wearing his golfing clothes, and Steve called me out and goes, “Why am I still wearing my golfing clothes? Wouldn’t I change at the club?” I said, “Well yeah, y’know, maybe you didn’t?” And we went back on forth on this until finally I said, “I just want to see you in the golfing outfit.” [Laughs.] Being honest. I said, “I just want to see you get into a fight wearing those knickers.” He laughed about it, and afterwards I said, “You’re right, this is absurd, we’ll see you at the golf club and that’s enough.” But yeah, it’s just a silly costume, and Steve is such a natural comedian, he totally knows what’s funny. He got it.

AVC: There’s another example from the previous episode, where Nucky’s talking with Margaret about the plan to make his case federal, and he says, “I violated the Mann Act!” with such gusto and pride.

TW: [Laughs.] Yeah, exactly. I mean, he’s so funny. He totally understands. Certain actors just know where the joke is. 

AVC: In The A.V. Club’s review of this episode, I mentioned the audience’s desire for blood, and that “murder diffuses drama,” meaning that it’s more tense when characters have to live alongside the people that are making their lives uncomfortable. What would you say to that?

TW:  I would agree. I don’t know if murder diffuses drama all the time, but certainly too much of it gets really boring. I remember back on The Sopranos  it was like, “When is Tony going to whack somebody?” And it’s like, “Is that all you guys want to see? Really? Tony bashes some guy on the head with his bat?” The difference between what makes a good episode or a bad episode for a large portion of the audience is whether or not somebody got splattered with blood or bashed somebody in the head with a tire-iron. Even going into this episode, we knew that a large portion of the audience was going to love it because it’s so violent, which is sad in a way, because the episode is so strong dramatically. The Harrow storyline in the woods, for example, was really poignant and interesting to us, but Eli beating a guy to death with a wrench, and him and Nucky brawling, and then of course the scalping at the end was what a lot of people focused on. But it depends on the circumstance. Certainly a well-placed murder can be very dramatic, as I hoped we achieved in our finale. But having to negotiate your way around people who you would like  to murder can also be dramatic as well.

“The Age Of Reason” (Oct. 30, 2011)
Margaret has to go to confession in preparation for her son Teddy’s confirmation, and Nucky’s worried that she’ll spill everything she knows about his business, when in fact she’s planning to tell the priest about her attraction to Nucky’s new bodyguard, Owen. Nucky entertains the impressionable U.S. attorney assigned to prosecute his now-federal case, but old enemies in Washington won’t let the case get buried. Jimmy learns from Leander that good business sense can accomplish more than violence, while Manny teaches the opposite lesson, by getting Jimmy to slaughter a traitor for him. And Lucy gives birth to Van Alden’s baby, while his guilt over multiple indiscretions leads him to confess his own sins to his wife.

AVC: At one point in this episode, Jimmy and Angela make note as they’re walking down the boardwalk that there are more radios around, and it seemed like in this season there was more diegetic music. Was the mention of the radios a way of explaining that?

TW:  We wanted to start introducing the idea that suddenly music was everywhere. It’s always fascinating to me that up until the dawn of radio, you didn’t hear music unless somebody had a piano. You didn’t hear popular songs unless you happened to be in a club, or somebody got the sheet music to a song and you were lucky enough to go to a home where somebody had a piano and could play it. Now suddenly, everyone’s got access to all this stuff. You’re hearing music everywhere. The boardwalk is such a great place for sound design, too. It’s such a cacophony of noises, and as you pass different places you’ll hearing different noises, whether it’s a carnival barker or a calliope or just various sounds of tourists, the ocean, all that stuff. Now introduced into that, you’re starting to hear music, Victrolas, stuff from other people’s houses. In episode three, when Van Alden buys Lucy the Victrola, this is a big deal. This is like, almost a status symbol, or keeping up with the neighbors. They’ve got a Victrola; now we’ve got the same one. Initially, Van Alden is against it, and then later the new nanny is introduced and Van Alden is almost bragging about the Victrola, the newest model. [Laughs.] He’s succumbing to consumerism. 

AVC: The credited writer on this episode is Bathsheba Doran. Should viewers presume that any credited writer wrote the script from start to finish, or is there a lot of re-working?

TW:  There is usually a great deal of rewriting, depending on who wrote it. When a writer’s assigned an episode, they generally get credit regardless of how much is rewritten. But episodes are rewritten, sometimes almost completely, other times not at all. I don’t believe I’ve ever done anything more than light editing on any episode written by Howard Korder, and then varying degrees depending on other writers. Other showrunners have policies of taking partial credit depending on how much rewriting they do, but in general, whomever’s assigned the episode initially is credited as the writer. We all sit in a room together and work out the outlines, and then somebody will go off with that outline and write a script, and then I’ll generally take it over after the first draft, occasionally after a second draft. I’ll take it over and do a pass, or Howard will do a pass, and ultimately that’s what you see. 

AVC: The reason I ask is that this episode advances two of the major intertwined themes of the season: religion and rules. You have Manny in this episode getting Jimmy to do this killing for him because the “meat” is not kosher, or “trayf,” and you have a nervous Nucky asking Margaret at one point, “How Catholic are  you?” So when your writers are assigned an episode like this, with all these different characters and their different relationships to religion and rules and faith, is that something that is discussed before it goes to the writer, or does the writer come up with that herself? Or am I again, like the half-faces in “What Does The Bee Do?,” seeing something that’s not there?

TW:  [Laughs.] No, no, that was there. The half-face is a visual motif that sort of happened by accident. But religion was really a big theme in this season, and we knew as the season progressed it was going to become pivotal, certainly for Margaret, going toward the later episodes. Rituals and rules—the rules we live by, and the rules we choose to accept or not accept—was very much a part of the fabric of the story as we outlined it in the writers’ room.

AVC: Nucky is developing his master plan to get back in power in this episode, and throughout this season he seems more on top of his business than he did at times in season one. One of the questions some viewers asked week after week in season one was whether Nucky is a shrewd, smart guy, or a very lucky guy, or just a ballsy guy? What would you say to that?

TW:  I think he’s a little of all three. He is very smart. I don’t think you can get to be somebody in that position without being shrewd. Ballsy? Yeah, absolutely. Same thing. It’s a rough town, and I think you’ve got to have a little balls to do it. It’s also mixed in with a little greed as well. Nucky had a pretty good life right up to Prohibition. He was doing fine as a treasurer of this corrupt city on the ocean, and suddenly the game changed in a really dramatic way. You could make the argument that this might’ve been a good time to pack it in and retire. Nucky doubled down and said, “You know what? **** it. I can make millions here.” But at the cost of potentially losing his life, or where it ends up at the end of season two, with him crossing the line and becoming a murderer himself. There’s a lot going on with him.

AVC: He seems to have this attitude that if everyone could just do exactly as he wants them to, then everyone would be happy. But someone always comes along to **** it up. 

TW:  [Laughs.] Change is really inconvenient, really inconvenient.

AVC: This episode contains one of Nucky’s best lines in season two: “Remus can go **** himself.”

TW:  [Laughs.] Right. Nucky throwing Remus’ verbal tic back at him.

AVC: You make good use throughout the season of that verbal tic.

TW:  Well that’s the kind of thing… like, if we had made that up as a character trait, I would’ve been uncomfortable with it, but because it was real, I felt like we had the license to go to town.

 

[big j 33]

“Peg Of Old” (Nov. 6, 2011)
Margaret visits her estranged brother and sisters in Brooklyn, and learns that her family is still mad at her for getting pregnant out of wedlock back in Ireland and stealing money to sail to America. Still reeling from their disapproval, Margaret comes home and finally sleeps with Owen, who’s just spent the day stalking and killing an enemy from the old country. Meanwhile, Jimmy’s alliance forces his hand, demanding that he take care of his Nucky problem once and for all by hiring a hit man—though the shooter misses his target and only tags Nucky’s hand. And while Lucy leaves town—sticking Van Alden with their daughter and a dirty diaper—new blood comes to Atlantic City in the form of sharp-witted U.S. Attorney Esther Randolph.

The A.V. Club: You talked earlier about what you can do with special effects to expand your existing set, but with this episode, you had to do a lot of building to show the Brooklyn streets, correct?

Terence Winter:  Yeah, that entire street is an alley that exists in New York. It’s actually in Manhattan, down around Tribeca. I forget the name. Bill Groom, who’s our incredible production designer, just transformed that street over the course of about 48 hours. He and his team just did a phenomenal job. Just really gorgeous. Just brought a different world back to life. 

AVC: So that was away from your usual set?

TW:  Yeah, that was a set dressed on location.

AVC: And yet you only used that street for maybe a minute and a half, two minutes. 

TW:  Yeah, yeah. But it really creates a world. Even with the boardwalk. We don’t see it every episode. If you pepper it in a few times, it gives you the idea of scope. You can do one massive shot of the boardwalk that might be a minute, just one little scene out there, and you see the world and you see the ocean. And you can do five more interior scenes after that, but y’know, just outside Nucky’s window that boardwalk is there. You feel it because you’ve seen it. A little of that goes a really long way. I think the street for Margaret in New York was a good example of that.

AVC: One of the recurring criticisms of season one was that Margaret didn’t seem to have enough of a story, but this episode really addresses who she is to a large degree: this idea of being cut off from her family and a stranger in a strange land, and what that means in terms of the choices she has.

TW:  Right. She’s really isolated here, and I think the more that she and Nucky become estranged during the course of the season, and the more you realize that she doesn’t really have a relationship with her family, and she’s here in this strange country, there’s a lot of things about herself she doesn’t even recognize anymore. She’s now living in this big fancy house in Atlantic City, and there’s really nothing in her world that can ground her. It’s sort of the perfect storm that sets her up for her tryst with Owen at the end—being rejected by her family, and her brother saying, “There’s no one here who knows you.” She’s in a really dark place, and when we pick up Owen at the end of the episode, he’s in a similarly altered state based on what he just did. I think he feels adrift as well. He’s not home, either. 

AVC: That’s something that’s maybe not that familiar an emotion to people today: feeling so far removed from home.

TW:  Yeah, I mean, it’s not like she can hop a plane and in five hours she’s back in Ireland. This was a two-week journey on a boat that not a lot of people could afford to do. And you can’t just pick up the phone or send somebody an email. You really would be completely isolated. I remember when I moved from New York to California in 1991, driving down the Santa Monica Freeway thinking, “If I died right now, nobody knows me here.” It’s a weird feeling. I’d just moved to strange city. I didn’t know anyone. And that’s just from New York to L.A. It’s not that big of a deal. If I felt that in 1991, and all I had to do was take out my cell phone and call home, what is somebody like Margaret feeling? Or Owen? A hundred years ago? It’s a big, big thing. The concept of home and family and who knows you is so rooted in our DNA. It’s really effective for drama.

AVC: This episode also deals with the big dramatic question that you mentioned a few episodes back, which is: Why don’t they just kill Nucky? In this episode, finally they just decide, “Okay, now.” But why at this point did the characters decide that Nucky has to go?

TW:  At some point, if you’re dealing with gangsters like Al Capone and Lucky Luciano, you have to say, “This is enough pussyfooting.” They’re only going to put up with a certain amount of pussyfooting. [Laughs.] This is a legitimate way to solve problems in that world. It would have been phony or false for us to not at least have considered that as an option for these guys. We knew at some point along the way, it’d have to be something they’d try and, of course, fail—if we wanted to keep Nucky alive, which we did. But to not address that as a potential option would have been false in the storytelling. Again, I didn’t want this whole season to be about a running gun battle between Nucky’s gang and their gang, but at some point we knew it had to come to that.

AVC: It’s interesting, too, because even at this point, Jimmy still does not have any conviction about it. He doesn’t want to do it. He just sort of has  to do it to look strong.

TW:  Yeah, he was really hoping that Nucky would just go to jail and go away, and that this would work out where no one got hurt, and everybody would get what they wanted, and nobody would have to die. Unfortunately, at this point, the world is sort of closing in on him, too. Even Eli now is completely comfortable with it, and his mother’s whispering in his ear, and the other guys, they’re all looking to him. “You’re supposed to be in charge of this thing.” He gets led along into a plan he’s not really comfortable with.

AVC: You have two big fight/gun scenes in “Peg Of Old.” You have the Owen scene in the washroom, and then you have the shooting of Nucky. How much time does it take to choreograph those sequences? Because they’re both very stylish and very kinetic.

TW:  Allen Coulter is such a talented director and so methodical in his preparation. I know he had Charlie Cox—who plays Owen—and the actor who played the guy he killed work for days with our stunt coordinator, choreographing that entire sequence. You’ve got really limited time. That was done here on the standing set, while the Babette’s sequence was done on our location of the Babette’s nightclub. But they worked for several days getting that just right. It’s physically really taxing, and because you are on a schedule, you’ve got to get it done within a certain amount of time. For matters of safety and ease of production, the better prepared you are, the better it turns out. Allen knew exactly the shots he wanted and had the whole thing planned out in advance, and maybe even storyboarded. So putting it together worked well, but those guys were exhausted by the end of the day. It’s maybe not quite as exhausting as actually killing someone, but pretty close. [Laughs.] It has to be.

AVC: You mentioned earlier that you were sort of picking up the mantle from Martin Scorsese  and trying to carry forth what he did in the pilot. Trying to ape anybody’s  style—and particularly somebody as masterful as Scorsese—must be difficult. How did you manage it?

TW:  It’s a lot of watching over and over what he’s done, and breaking it down into its component parts. It’s all about color palette and lighting and set design, and all that stuff sort of goes together. It’s really just deconstructing. Y’know, that’s probably a better question for Tim Van Patten than me, in terms of the types of shots, the types of lenses used, that sort of thing. I think Timmy just nailed it. It was completely seamless. Timmy directed episodes two and three of the series coming right out of the pilot. For me, it was completely seamless visually, and continues on in that vein.

AVC: Is it frustrating that there are people who still assume this is Scorsese’s show?

TW:  No, not at all. I mean, it is his show, in large part. He’s the reason we have a show. My first meeting with HBO, they said, “Martin Scorsese’s attached to this,” and I remember going home and saying to my wife, “I’ve just been handed a television show. If I can figure this out, we have a TV show, because Martin Scorsese’s behind it. This will happen. I just have to not **** this up now.” [Laughs.] Even though he’s only directed the pilot, he’s involved. He gives us notes on scripts, and he watches dailies, and he weighs in on casting, and we talk all the time. He’s very much involved. He’s definitely a presence creatively for all of us. 

AVC: The Esther Randolph character really brings a new energy in at this point in the series…

TW:  Yeah, and such a great actress, Julianne Nicholson. Wonderful across the board, and beautiful, and just a pleasure to work with. Really fun for us because we finally get an opportunity to have a really strong woman on the show, who’s a different kind of woman. She’s not a showgirl. She’s not some tough hooker chick. This is a really intelligent, strong woman. For us it was sort of a breath of fresh air to be able to write that character as well.

AVC: And she’s based on Mabel Walker Willebrandt, but you decided to not to make it Mabel Walker Willebrandt. Same reason as with the Nucky Thompson/Nucky Johnson decision?

TW:  Yeah, same thing. We don’t know where we want to take her. Who knows where she may end up in the future, or even in her reality of being in Atlantic City? We thought, “Close enough.” She’s clearly based on this woman, but why not give ourselves the latitude of letting her go places where the real Mabel didn’t go?

“Two Boats And A Lifeguard” (Nov. 13, 2011)
A wounded Nucky makes his play, pretending to give Jimmy what he wants by stepping down from power, just to prove to Jimmy that he’s not ready to attend to the thousand little details that make running the city such a challenge. To underline that point, Nucky privately urges Chalky to mobilize the block community into causing labor trouble. Making matters worse, Manny has come to Atlantic City to demand from Jimmy either the money or the booze he was long ago supposed to have received, but Jimmy doesn’t yet have either, because Nucky hasn’t made it easy to do business. And Jimmy’s wife Angela commences a sexual relationship with another woman.

AVC: “Two Boats And A Lifeguard” opens with a dream sequence, which is something that frequently happened on The Sopranos  as well. What’s the reason for using that device to help tell this story?

TW:  I felt that if there was ever a time in Nucky’s trajectory so far that would lend itself to a dream sequence, this was it. He’s really in a dark place. He’s obviously under tremendous pressure. He’s got the world closing in. He’s just been shot—almost murdered. So I just thought, creatively, we really earned it, in the sense that he’d really be having a lot on his mind.

It’s interesting, too, because as we’re shooting the first scene, he comes out of that dream and Dr. Surran is changing the bandage on his hand, and Nucky’s saying, “Am I daydreaming or did I nod off?” We really couldn’t decide. I said, “I think it could be either. It could’ve been that your mind is wandering, or maybe you might be thinking about a dream you had the night before.” With actors generally, the best course is to just give them a direct answer. With Steve [Buscemi] though, he’s a director himself. He actually gave me that advice when I first directed. He said, “Look, if anybody asks you a question, just give them an answer. Doesn’t matter. You can always change your mind later. ‘The red one. The blue one. Anything.’” So I know he knows that trick, so I said, “I’m going to be honest with you. I don’t know.” I said, “Whatever works for you is good.” And I guess whatever works for the audience is good, too. We know it’s obviously not reality. Whether he nodded off or daydreamed, it doesn’t really matter. 

AVC: You mention the bandage, and there’s a moment in this episode where Nucky meets with Chalky and suggests that now might be the time for a strike, and Chalky reaches out his hand to shake, and Nucky gestures toward his bandage as if to say, “Sorry, my hand can’t do it.” But this also means that nothing’s official, because Nucky never shook on it. Was that intentional or inadvertent?

TW:  [Laughs.] Yeah, you’re maybe reading into a little bit. That wasn’t intended. It really was just about his hand.

AVC: What was the thought process behind Chalky’s arc for this season, and in particular the revelations that he’s illiterate and harbors resentments toward the middle class in his community?

TW:  Again, coming into season two, one of the great advantages of getting the pick-up to move forward was that we got to start to really peel back the layers of who these characters are. We realized we had an opportunity to go home with Chalky and see what his family life was like, and really start to explore who this guy is and why he is the way he is. It was really just starting from there. We mentioned in season one that Chalky had a big house, as big as the mayor or bigger. We thought, “Who is this guy? What does he want?” Well, he’s this guy who’s got aspirations to have his kids do better than he did, and go to college. He’s got this beautiful wife. But we also realized that it’s very possible that Chalky, being this guy from the streets, has a lot less in common with his kids than the guys he works with. In doing all this hard work to give them every advantage, he’s sort of an alien in his own house. His kids grow up and make fun of him behind his back. He’s illiterate, and they goof on him a little bit. The little girl says, “Daddy will you read me this book?” and the son says, “You’re asking Daddy?” It’s sad in a way. Here this guy’s breaking his back—even though he’s completely a criminal—to give these kids everything, and in some ways, they’re embarrassed of him and resent him, or at least he perceives that they do.

That was something I really wanted to explore, and it really is a sad and poignant moment at the end of episode four, where he really does feel like a “field ******” in his own house. He belongs out in the shed, while the fancy people belong inside the house that he’s provided for them. I was really interested in exploring that aspect of who he is, and of course then layering in the idea that he does wield a great deal of power in the African-American community in Atlantic City, because they really made up a large part of the infrastructure of the town. When they were organized, they made the difference between whether people were making money or not making money in Atlantic City. Suddenly there were no waiters, no busboys, no dock workers, no people pushing rolling chairs, that sort of stuff. Chalky really, being the guy who controlled all that, wielded a great deal of power. We set that up very early on and that would pay off later in the season.

AVC: You introduce Angela’s new lover in this episode, who unfortunately is not going to be around for very long. But here, she and Angela go to this party on the beach, with artistic types and homosexuals, and it’s like another world within the world of the show, and one that we haven’t seen too much. Do you develop characters for Boardwalk Empire  with the thought that, “Okay, with this character we’ll have a chance to explore the gay community of 1921?” To consciously expand the scope of the show?

TW:  No, it’s not conscious. Angela’s artistic, and she’s certainly got a bisexual component to her as well, so just taking those as some of her basic character traits, we say, “Where might we go with that?” Then it’s really a question of opening up the world from there. I didn’t consciously give her all these different character traits, thinking that was going to lead us down the road into a lot of other interesting areas. It’s just that once you start to explore who someone is, you can sort of expand from there.

Margaret is another good example of how that works. We knew she came over from Ireland, and that was her characteristic initially. She’s an immigrant. Then we came up with the idea that she came here when she was 16. She lost a baby on the trip over. Then we were thinking, “Okay, why did she leave Ireland? Who did she leave behind? What happened to those people? Where are they now?” We came up with the idea that they were in New York. She could contact them. You just sort of expand it as it goes along, and create new situations by asking questions.

“Battle Of The Century” (Nov. 20, 2011)
While Jack Dempsey prepares to defend his World Heavyweight Championship in Jersey City, Jimmy declines an offer to go to the fight in person and chooses to listen to it on the new medium of pay radio, while in the process finding his morose friend Richard a girl to fool around with. Chalky encourages Dunn to lead a strike against the Atlantic City hotels, while Esther Randolph shakes up the local law enforcement to get info about Nucky. And while Margaret deals with the revelation that her daughter has polio, Nucky is in Ireland, negotiating a guns-for-booze trade that is next phase in his “stymie Jimmy” plan.

AVC: Where were the Irish sequences shot?

TW:  Westchester. There’s a big mansion out there, and we did a lot of green-screen, blocking things out, adding some rolling Irish meadows, that sort of thing. But it was all in New York. 

AVC: There’s a terrific bit of staging in this episode when Nucky is driving away from that mansion, and we see McGarrigle getting shot way in the back of the frame, seen through the rear window of the car. This episode was directed by Brad Anderson. Did he conceive that shot or was that in the script?

TW:  That was in the script.

AVC: How much freedom do your directors have to play around with the visual components on an episode?

TW:  They have freedom as long as they run it by me first, and we discuss it. First and foremost, it’s about telling the story. Any shot has to service getting the information across. That being the ironclad rule, starting from there, okay, I’m certainly open to hearing different ways of presenting that information. As long as we’re telling the story, and the information we need to convey is getting out there, that’s great. Then it’s a question of what actually are we talking about. I’m not really a big fan of elaborate shots just for the sake of being able to do them, but always interested to hear or see a different take on something.

AVC: McGarrigle gets shot by his former allies in part because he’s become a weaker leader since his son died. Was there any intentional parallel between that and the storyline of Emily getting polio?

TW:  No.

AVC: The spinal-tap sequence with Emily—where Margaret is stuck behind a glass partition—is excruciating to watch, especially for viewers who have young children.

TW:  Yeah, absolutely, and excruciating to do. The girls, Lucy and Josie Gallina, who play our little Emily, are so sweet, and such good screamers and criers. [Laughs.] It’s so painful to hear them evenpretend  to be afraid or pretend to be hurt. Kelly [MacDonald] is a mom herself, and I’m a dad, and just about everybody on the set has kids or is around kids, and you can’t help but put yourself in that situation. You’d so gladly trade places with the child for anything, and of course, you can’t. It’s really painful. Steve Buscemi told me when he read the script, and came to the last line when Owen reads in the telegram that Emily has polio, he flung it across the room. He said he was so upset, as if this was a real kid. He thought she was going to die, and was relieved that she was only going to be crippled. [Laughs.] You really get invested. It’s incredible.

AVC: Emily getting polio drives a lot of what happens in the rest of the season. At what point did you decide this was the direction for that character and for Margaret’s story? 

TW:  Very early on in the plotting out of the season. I knew that was going to be the thing that really just completely rocked her world. I grew up Catholic and went to Catholic school, and just assuming Margaret was Irish Catholic at the end of the 19th century in Ireland, regardless of what her opinions are about religion, it’s almost part of your DNA. Bad things start to happen, and you look skyward and think, “Okay, I’m being punished.” And what’s a worse punishment for a mother than to have her child afflicted with this horrible disease? You start to internalize. “My child’s being punished for my sins.” It lent itself so perfectly to the very thing Margaret was being asked to do. It all goes back the death of this child’s father, killed at the start of the series by Nucky’s men. Even for a rational, thinking, modern woman, given her background, it made perfect sense to me that she would start to spin wildly out of control and think, “I am being punished for this.” For me, there’s no question she would absolutely succumb to that way of thinking.

AVC: You don’t show any of the actual Dempsey-Carpentier fight, though it appears briefly on the radio. Did you entertain the idea at any point of actually shooting a boxing match?

TW:  We did. Because it would have been prohibitively expensive, we decided that it wouldn’t really work for us, and because this was the dawn of radio and the first sports broadcast ever, we thought, “Wow, that’s a fun thing to do, might be a more interesting way to go since we can’t afford to do the actual fight.” And it worked out pretty well.

That was the first pay-per-view event—or pay-per-listen. And they had no idea if that was going to be successful or not. They couldn’t get their heads around the idea that, “So they’re going to fight, and you’re going to talk about watching the fight over the radio? People are actually going to listen to this?” We couldn’t get a copy. There’s no copy that exists of the actual broadcast. But I did read an article about it, and it said that the broadcaster was very calm and methodical in his description. We thought, “If our broadcaster does it like this, it’s going to sound so weird,” so we did it more like the 1940s-style fight broadcast that you’re more used to.  I actually recorded that voice for the fight announcer. That’s me on the TV there.

“Georgia Peaches” (Nov. 27, 2011)
Margaret turns back to God to help Emily with her polio, while Nucky takes Margaret’s impertinent son Teddy with him on a road trip to meet his new lawyer (a Ty Cobb fan). Jimmy is overwhelmed by the costs and logistics of doing business, especially with Nucky’s Irish whiskey stealing market share and Chalky’s labor strike crippling tourism. And after a botched hit on him in Philadelphia, Manny comes to Atlantic City to take revenge on Jimmy, killing Angela and her new lover.

The A.V. Club: In “Georgia Peaches” we say goodbye to poor Angela Darmody. Obviously, people need to die in order for the dramatic choices of the show to have some real consequences. But how hard is it to decide to get rid of a character?

Terence Winter:  It’s huge. It’s a huge thing. One of the things we had to promise each other here, and we did this on The Sopranos  as well, is that we would never keep a character alive just because we liked the actor. We had to completely take that relationship out of the equation, because then you’d never  kill anybody. In general, we really have a great time working with these people, and everybody gets along, and it’s really fun. But you can’t do the job unless you can approach this clinically. From that standpoint, it’s hard because those emotions do start to creep in.

From a storytelling aspect, it’s hard as well because you start to realize, “All right, there’s no more Angela.” And that’s a huge character, somebody we were invested in. She’s gone. That starts to affect the balance of the show, and the other characters, how they relate to each other, etc. It’s not done lightly. If you look at the thing as a whole, as a giant chess game, you’re giving up a rook or a bishop to win the game, with a “win” being a successful series that you feel is dramatically balanced and compelling. You really try to think it through before you take that plunge. With the Angela thing, we ultimately decided that to move that story forward and Jimmy’s story forward, that’s where we needed to go. It was a very tough call to make, and literally a very tough phone call to have to make to call Aleksa [Palladino] and tell her that her character was dying. But that’s the job.

AVC: How soon did she know?

TW:  I called her while we were shooting episode eight to tell her.

AVC: You mentioned not wanting to not kill characters because you like the actors or like what they bring, but are there times where characters just pop in a way you hadn’t expected,  so you end up doing more with them in the show than you thought you were going to do?

TW:  Oh yeah, absolutely. Richard Harrow is a great example. We weren’t sure where that character was going to go or how much we would use him or not, but Jack [Huston] was just terrific in the role and just absolutely popped off the screen immediately. The dynamic between him and Jimmy—and really him and anybody—was just so fascinating that as soon as we saw it, we said, “We want more of that.” It was just one of those things. On the page we thought, “Yeah this is interesting,” but how it’s going to come across is something you don’t know until you get it on film. Then you go, “Oh my God, look at this. Look at these two guys together.” It’s just great. You want to see that. Or you throw different characters together. Nucky and Eddie, for example; it’s always funny. Even the slightest little moment between the two of them is always gold. Van Alden? You could watch the guy eat soup. [Laughs.] Van Alden in any circumstance, for the most part, is fascinating. Who this guy is, what he thinks of the world. Him and Rose together were just gold for me as well. You want to get these actors in scenes together just to see the magic that happens. You never know when it’s going to come or where you’re going to get it from.

AVC: We haven’t talked about Harrow much, but he is such a powerful character, bringing a lot to the show even just visually. Jack Huston’s working with limited facial expressions and a limited vocal expression, yet he brings real depth to Harrow.

TW:  It is amazing. I remember reading some comments from people who were saying they didn’t understand why Harrow would want to kill himself. I said to Jack, “This is really a testament to you. People like you so much, even with half a face.” People think, “Oh this guy’s great.” Like, he couldtotally  get girls and be the guy you want to hang out with. From Harrow’s perspective, the world is this horrible place, but he is so compelling. And so charming, in a way. I guess people want to take care of him. “No, don’t kill yourself. It’s not that bad. You still have the other half of your face.” [Laughs.] It’s funny, but yeah, he really can do more with that than many actors can do with reams of dialogue.

AVC: Throughout the season some viewers questioned the choices Jimmy was making, like him not just paying Manny what he owes. One thing “Georgia Peaches” makes clear is that even though Nucky is letting Jimmy be “the boss,” Jimmy doesn’t have any money and doesn’t really have any power. Were you trying to establish from the start of the season that Jimmy may not be up to the task?

TW:  Certainly. Once The Commodore is taken out of the game, the whole domino tower just completely collapses. Jimmy and Eli really were relying on the Commodore’s former relationships, and this guy sort of leading the charge and being able to negotiate them through the coup. Without him, now it’s all about Jimmy and Eli, and Eli’s totally lost confidence in this whole endeavor. Jimmy’s just trying to stay above water, financially. This is not good. 

AVC: One thing this show does very well, and The Sopranos  did very well, and something that Breaking Bad  also excels at, is getting across the idea that any kind of criminal enterprise is not easy. You can’t just make something illegal, go out in the street, and sell it. There are steps you have to take along the way.

TW:  There was a guy a few years ago who did a whole study of drug dealers in Chicago, I think, and essentially concluded that the average drug dealer makes slightly more than minimum wage, based on cost of inventory, and time spent on the street, and arrests, etc. It’s one of the ****tiest jobs in the country, and yet it looks like you just see these guys flashing rolls of cash and diamonds and cars and stuff. The reality is far different. Yeah, there are a few people way up the food chain that make a little money, but your average drug dealer is barely, barely making a living. You’d be better off working at Burger King, because nobody’s trying to kill you. Presumably. [Laughs.]

“Under God’s Power She Flourishes” (Dec. 4, 2011)
Van Alden finally gets busted for the murder of a fellow agent and flees Atlantic City, eventually settling in a small town in Illinois. Small-time crook Michael “Mickey Doyle” Kozik (Paul Sparks) makes a surprise power play, taking advantage of the turmoil in the bootlegging business. And Jimmy, still reeling from Angela’s death (and heavily dosed on heroin) flashes back to his days at Princeton, where he first met Angela, and where everything was going so well until his mother showed up, got him hammered, and had sex with him. Snapping back into consciousness, a woozy Jimmy kills The Commodore.

AVC: Here’s the big one: what I referred to in my review as Jimmy “hitting for the Oedipal cycle.” You hinted as early as season one that there was some kind of twisted relationship between Jimmy and his mother, but I wrote in a review halfway through this season that I believed these two were just strange by nature, and there probably hadn’t been any incest. So, you fooled me.

TW:  Yeah! [Laughs.] All right, good.

AVC: Did you know as early as season one that this had happened between them?

TW:  I wasn’t sure yet if it had ever consummated, but I certainly didn’t rule it out. The first time we meet Gillian, she runs practically naked and jumps into Jimmy’s arms and straddles him and kisses him on the mouth. It’s just inappropriate. Midway through that scene he calls her Ma, and the whole intention was for people to go, “What? Did he just call her Ma? What the ****?” [Laughs.] And you realize, holy ****, this is a woman who is only 13 years older than him, and is his mother. I knew, just by the nature of the fact that she was a showgirl, and she’d had him when she was a child herself, that they’d probably had an inappropriate relationship for many reasons. She was a child raising another child, and didn’t really understand how to set boundaries. He was raised in the back of nightclubs, with naked women around, including his mother, and there’s just a lot of weird, inappropriate behavior between the two of them, born of her circumstance. How far that actually ever went, we didn’t really know very early on, but then once we started to create what the real backstory was, we asked the question, “What was it that made Jimmy go off to war and leave Angela pregnant with their child? What was this momentous event?” The answer started to become really clear to us that it involved Gillian, and it was probably that.

AVC: Was there any worry that you may be pushing the audience too far?

TW:  No. This was the story. As uncomfortable as people might be with it, it’s an aspect of life. Things like this happen. We’re trying to be honest in our storytelling, and sometimes life is uncomfortable. 

AVC: You mentioned a few episodes back about how you try not to employ a visual style that calls too much attention to itself. But in this episode you do get a little more impressionistic, with the music on the soundtrack bleeding between scenes, and the clatter of the trains becoming the clatter of a typewriter. There’s a lot of flair in sound design and the look. Was it because of the dreamy state Jimmy was in?

TW:  Yeah, there’s a lot of that. This was directed by Allen Coulter, who really prepares and completely plans out the visual motifs and sound design and lighting. Just everything, really. Even the look of the color palette. Even the look of 1916 as opposed to 1921, in terms of having this sort of washed-out effect. All this stuff was well-planned. But yeah, Jimmy in the present day is on a heroin binge, self-medicating as a result of hearing the news of Angela’s death. There is a dreamlike quality to a lot of it. Even at the end, when he’s sitting in The Commodore’s house after having killed The Commodore, there’s that very strange moment where he comes out of his stupor and sees Richard across the hallway and then kind of falls back asleep, and when he wakes up, it’s all gone. For a moment you think, “Did he imagine that or did it really happen?” And of course, it did really happen. The whole episode has a very dreamlike effect.

AVC: Throughout this episode, there’s a looming question of whether people can face up to the difficult things, their relationships, or the judgment that’s coming to them. That extends to Van Alden, who talks about getting right with God, and yet when he’s about to get arrested, he just bolts.

TW:  [Laughs.] Easier said than done, right? It goes to one of the earlier things you talked about in terms of hypocrisy. It’s very easy to preach and say what you will do or what you should do. Very often when you’re pushed to put your money where your mouth is, your instinct is to run away. That’s certainly what Van Alden opts for. 

AVC: There’s a great Nucky line in this episode that says so much about his character, in addition to being very funny. Margaret is retelling her priest’s lesson about the oversized spoons in heaven and hell, and how in heaven people survive because they feed each other, and Nucky says, “Why couldn’t they hold them higher up on the handle?”

TW:  [Laughs.] Just logic. It ruins the entire story. I had written that whole parable and wrote that line as well. There was a lot of debate about that with me and [the episode’s writer] Howard [Korder] and Allen, because that’s a long story that Father Brendan tells Margaret. We ultimately decided it was worth keeping only for Nucky’s line. The callback is funny enough to justify him giving her that whole spiel in the hospital.

AVC: It’s got to be very satisfying, because it’s not just a funny line,  but also it explains who Nucky is.

TW:  Yeah, he cuts through all the ********. “This makes no sense at all. What do you mean? They couldn’t just hold them up?” [Laughs.]

AVC: This episode takes Mickey Doyle, a character who’d been puttering around on the fringes of the entire first two seasons,  and makes him a major player. At what point did you decide to make Doyle more prevalent?

TW:  He’s another great example of somebody where the role got bigger because the actor is so interesting. We’re always interested when Paul Sparks is on screen as Mickey. He makes me laugh. He can take one or two lines and really steal a scene. As the season and series progressed, we found ourselves wanting to know more about him, and that’s really a testament to how terrific an actor Paul is. He makes you watch him, and then he makes you want more of him. Then you think, “Well, if we want more of him, we just need to write him.” Because we also started thinking, “This guy just walks through the raindrops. People are dropping dead left and right around this guy. He’s got to be a lot smarter than he appears to be.” That whole goofy laugh and the dopey expression on his face are really by design. We come into episode 12, and you see that a little when he’s in the back of the synagogue with Nucky and Manny Horvitz. It’s the first time you start to see a different Mickey Doyle. He’s not quite the buffoon he appears to be, but that’s his survival skill. As things went on, we wanted to bring him more to the fore, and say, “This is a guy who’s definitely worth keeping an eye on.”

“To The Lost” (Dec. 11, 2011)
Nucky swoops back into power by marrying Margaret (so she won’t have to testify against him) and persuading Eli to take the fall for him (so Esther Randolph won’t have a case to prosecute). But there are complications: The new legally empowered Margaret signs over a good chunk of Nucky’s property to the church; and,  to tie off his biggest loose end, Nucky kills Jimmy.

AVC: Was the entire second season complete before its first episode premièred?

TW:  I’m not 100-percent positive, but I think it was, yes.

AVC: Did you know you’d been renewed for a third season while you were working on the final episode?

TW:  We were pretty sure. I don’t think we knew officially, but all signs pointed toward a renewal. If your question is, “Did we kill Jimmy thinking that was going to be it?” No, not at all. I assumed we were going to continue forward with the series. 

AVC: Could this episode have served as an ending to the series, do you think?

TW:  It could’ve, certainly. But I’m glad it’s not. [Laughs.]

AVC: At what point did you decide that Jimmy had to go?

TW:  Early on in the season. I wrestled with it, back and forth a lot, more than any other decision I’ve ever made creatively in my career. Maybe more than any I ever will make. It was a huge, huge decision. This is a major character on the show. A terrific character. A terrific actor, a great guy. Really a lot of fun working with him. And I knew this was going to be a major mind**** for the audience. We’ve got 70 years, practically, of television history to draw from, and there are rules of TV and rhythms of TV that people have come to expect. One of the rules is that this could not  happen. People get so lulled into complacency with the idea that, “Okay, I’ve seen this before. At the last minute, something’s going to happen, and some sort of deus ex machina will occur to prevent Nucky from having to do what I’m being led to believe he’s going to do. He’s going to turn around and shoot Manny Horvitz, or he’s going to kill his brother. The police are going to show up. It’s going to be something.” And that was my intention all along. No, it’s actually exactly what you think.

I was worried that people were going to be upset early on. Once Jimmy starts to make amends to Nucky in the episode, as an audience member, I would’ve said, “This is ********. So the guy all year long is trying to **** this guy up, and tries to have him killed, and now he’s sorry and he’s going to help get Chalky White’s Klan guys, and he’s going to kill Nucky’s enemies and then all’s forgiven? **** that! That’s ********.” [Laughs.] That’s what I thought people were going to say. And then the answer: No. Nucky is just using Jimmy. All is not forgiven, and he’s going to kill him anyway.

Then, of course, people freaked out when he actually did it. [Laughs.] In a huge way. Like you just couldn’t believe. I made you feel something you didn’t want to feel. You really liked this guy, and felt sympathetic toward this guy, and are very conflicted. Why not Manny? Why not his ******g brother, who also tried to have him killed, who really wanted  to have him killed? Well, life is unfair, and Nucky maybe should’ve  killed those guys. Maybe Nucky made a big mistake. But that’s how it played out. That’s what makes it, for me, so compelling, and so horrifying in a way. It’s just, “Wow. Holy ****. He really did that.”

AVC: It’s kind of the reverse of the Richard Harrow sequence on Memorial Day. I was legitimately tense during the Memorial Day scenes in the woods with Richard, because I knew that you could very well have this character die. But I wasn’t tense at all when it looked like Nucky was about to kill Jimmy. I was sure it wouldn’t happen. It was a shocking moment.

TW:  A lot of people think it didn’t happen. [Laughs.] They think it’s a dream sequence. Again, it’s like, they’re hoping against hope that this isn’t real. But he is dead.

AVC: Not to pit you against series that you probably don’t have time to watch, but there were a couple other shows around the same time as your finale that built to a big, climactic moment where a major character could’ve died, but didn’t. One is Sons Of Anarchy  and the other is Breaking Bad. Breaking Bad, as it always does, found some perfectly logical way to allow its hero to live on, albeit in an even worse, crueler way; whereas Sons Of Anarchy  seemed to duck the issue completely, and let a character live who should logically be dead.

TW:  Yeah, I mean we’re all just trying to get through the day here. [Laughs.] I totally respect whatever anybody has to do on these shows. To paraphrase something Nucky said, “We all have to decide how much sin we can live with.” For me, creatively, I had to decide whether I would accept Nucky notkilling Jimmy, and ultimately, I wouldn’t. It’s holding to my own standard. I made my bed here, and I creatively have to lie in this, because I would call ******** on another show that let this guy live. Again, logically I probably could’ve come up with a reason where you say, “Eh, let’s have Nucky kill his brother.” The history between Nucky and Jimmy, and after all he feels he did for this kid, at this point, I think, Jimmy’s got to go. That’s really, for me, the only true solution to this. The chips will fall where they may.

AVC: How important was it that Nucky be the one to kill Jimmy?

TW:  It really comes full circle. This is something we set up in the pilot. Jimmy is the very person who told Nucky, “You can’t be half a gangster anymore.” We knew at one point, the line would be crossed completely, where Nucky would become a full gangster by pulling the trigger himself. Up until that point, it was Nucky ordering other people to do it, or having people roughed up and that sort of stuff. Now, to come full circle and cross that line, he has to be the guy to pull the trigger. Otherwise there were just really no real consequences for him, psychologically or in becoming a “real gangster.” That’s how you do it. That’s how the whole idea of “making your bones,” that you’re going to be the guy who does the murder. The idea that the very person who told him that is the one who’s the recipient of that bullet is something that was by design.

AVC: There’s a great line in the episode where Nucky says, “How can someone ordersomeone to commit murder?” As if this is some sort of justification for everything he’s done wrong: that people have free will.

TW:  [Laughs.] Yeah, yeah. If I told you to jump off a bridge, would you do that? It’s that childish rationalization.

AVC: You have another spectacular shot at the very beginning of this episode where the camera is behind the masked Jimmy and the double-masked Richard, driving out to the Klan camp, and for a few seconds the audience doesn’t know where they are, who anybody is, or where they’re going.

TW:  That was scripted, and also designed in very close collaboration with Tim Van Patten, who more than any other director has directed things written by me. Tim very often will just walk into my office and pitch me a sequence, and just go, “What about this? We just open, you’re already on the move, on the truck?” I’m a very big fan of opening episodes really hot, where it’s mid-action, or something really jarring happens, and then sort of slows down a little bit. This is a perfect example: cold open, bang, get into it as quickly as possible. We even edited that down some. I think that opening shot of them driving was even longer in our initial cuts of the show, and we cut deeper into it so you’re only with them for a few seconds, driving that car. By the time you’re orienting yourself as a viewer, Jimmy’s already got the gun out, and has already blown a guy’s face off. And you’re like, “What the **** is going on?” [Laughs.] And you’re already into it. It was meant to be jarring and gripping.

I honestly don’t remember if Tim came in and pitched me that sequence, which he very possibly could have, or if I wrote it that way. In any case, it’s always a collaboration in that sense. A good example is the whole Klan shootout: The Klan attack in episode one of season two was completely Tim Van Patten. We knew it was going to be a Klan attack. He actually came into my office and performed the entire sequence for me. “This is what happens: Chalky and the guy, there’s a knock on the door, and the guy opens the door. Machine gun. Bladadadadada. And then Chalky runs, and he falls on the floor.” This went on for like five minutes. He was in a sweat when he finished. [Laughs.] I’m like, “Okay, I’ll just write that.” I basically took dictation, wrote it in script form, and gave it back to him. He shot it, but he had that whole sequence designed in his head. 

AVC: What about the big montage in this episode?

TW:  That was painstakingly  scripted. Which visuals matching which dialogue, during what line… that’s the kind of thing that just takes days and days to craft, editorially and even on the page. Taking all that footage and marrying it to those words. That’s a real testament to Tim and our terrific editorial team, Kate Sanford and Tim Streeto. 

AVC: It’s very true to the genre, too. In the spirit of The Godfather  and Goodfellas.

TW:  Yeah, I always freely admit what a huge influence Goodfellas  is. Call it stealing, call it homage, but that is always something that’s in the back of my head: that style, the whole look of it, the manner of storytelling. Anything Marty’s [Martin Scorsese’s] ever done, really, and certainly The Godfather  as well. 

AVC: Back at the start of this, we talked reorienting people to the world of the show in a season première. You have to do something similar in the finale, which is deciding how much you need to say about where everybody’s at before you leave them behind until next year. In this finale, we get just a little bit of Van Alden, and just a little bit of Chalky, and a lot more of the other characters. Do you wish you’d had more time to deal with everybody, or do you feel like you got it about right?

TW:  No, it was exactly the right amount. Van Alden, I sort of set up in Cicero, Illinois. People who are students of mob history know what Cicero means in the larger sense. That, in 1924, became the headquarters of Al Capone. Van Alden inadvertently has ended up in what will become a hotbed of activity for the Capone gang wars of the ’20s. Chalky is now off the hook for his murder charge. Nucky and Margaret: Margaret has now realized that she’s been duped by this man who she just got off for murder, and has essentially decided that she doesn’t owe him anything anymore. As far as the religious stuff, she’s essentially written a massive check to God in the form of giving this land away. I think, in her mind, all debts are paid to God and the church, and as far as her relationship with Nucky, we’ll see where that picks up in season three.

AVC: Do you know where you’re going to begin season three yet? 

TW:  Season three will begin 14 to 16 months in the future. It will actually begin on New Year’s Eve 1922, heading into 1923. So quite a bit of time has passed since we’ve seen everybody, and we pick up the characters in the future a little bit.

AVC: It seemed that there was a real momentum to the buzz around Boardwalk Empire  throughout season two. People seemed to be starting to find the show, and appreciate it a little more. Did you sense that at all?

TW:  I don’t really pay that much attention to it. I saw that people were talking about it a lot, which is good. I knew we were getting more popular when Howard Stern started talking about the show and saying how much he liked it, which was great. And of course, the president came out and said he watched. That was really cool. Enormously flattering. But again, we really try to do the best show we can and hope people are watching and liking it—and that’s it. Because it can really be destructive, in a way. There’s so much out there these days, so much criticism and analysis of every little thing. It can take over your life if you let it. I think earlier on, in season one, when the show was first premièring, I was much more conscious of who watched, and how many people watched, and what they were saying, what they thought. As it went on, I realized there is  an audience, and they’re going to watch it. That’s enough for me to know. I can’t get caught up in the rest because that would just take over my life.  

 

[jhawk826]

That was a long read, but it wasn't a good read.

You get the feeling he tried humanizing the Margaret character, but she is not sympathetic.
 

 

[big j 33]

I have nothing new to add.. just that I'm beyond ready for this season to start.

 

[T0INE]

 

[blade br0wn]

.BOSS SEASON.

 

[shorty doo wop]

I dont have HBO GO anymore

 

[big j 33]

5 Spoiler-Free Reasons To Look Forward To The Third Season of ‘Boardwalk Empire’

Read more: http://www.uproxx.com/tv/2012/09/5-...-third-season-boardwalk-empire/#ixzz26U4ww0Zs

---

---

[h1]DECKED OUT: BOARDWALK EMPIRE[/h1]
By Mike Newman

Ah, Atlantic City. Vegas’ less attractive kid sister. Now home to some solid spots to blow your savings like the Borgata and Revel, the Jersey city has a past awesomely devoid of Snooki. For a quality history lesson, just tune into the return of Boardwalk Empire this weekend. If you’ve got the urge to steal a bit of Jimmy’s look, we’ve got your hook up.

1. Sterling Silver Pistol Money Clip – $150

2. Murray’s Pomade – $4

3. Skull & Crossbones Cigarette Case – $55

4. Vintage Lift Art Pocket Lighter – $36

5. Goorin Bros Andre Hat – $60

6. J.Crew Harvest Herringbone Vest – $138

7. J.Crew Wallace & Barnes Ainsworth Shirt – $98

8. Hawkins McGill Menswear Wool Trouser – $64

9. Bird’s-Eye Wool Tie – $70

10. Great American Flask – $99

11. Sebago Brattle in British Tan – $145

12. Kent Slim Jim Comb – $9

13. 1918 U.S. Trench Knife – $17

http://coolmaterial.com/style/decked-out-boardwalk-empire/

 

[jumpman91023]

idk where I've been, but i saw it advertise on Youtube and it looks good. Gonna have to start watching

 

[imasoleman18]

cant wait for sunday

 

[teamjordan79]

its been too long

 

[tooeasy891]

cant wait

 

[ootherocoo]

Can't wait!!

 

[Nawzlew]

September is a beautiful month.

All my shows coming back

 

[Nike Jordan]

Hell yeah!

 

[hottubthony]

YO! Bruh I'm too excited. DF!!!

 

[trilluminated]

i have to watch this..

even though i'm still pissed off at that boy nucky for what he did to jimmy.

 

[macbk]

9PM needs to come a bit faster .