HBO's Boardwalk Empire

I liked the first episode. Nucky has gone full gangster, it seems.

 

First episode was pretty damn good.

And whoever the guy is that they show opened with having the flat tire, that guy, man they gave him some awesome lines.

When he told Luciano to "Go sit in the corner, short pants" I about lost it.

Gonna be a long, bloody season it looks like.

 

Bobby Canavalle

He was great as Paul Giamatti's buddy/assistant wrestling coach in "Win Win."

 

He plays the role very well.

and I know I've seen him in more than just this.

Also, for some reason, he reminded me of a young Elliott Gould

 

i most recently saw him in a recurring role on 'nurse jackie.' the guy delivers the good on this, too. 8)

 

Curious to see how the rest of the season goes, because Nucky just doesn't have the muscle to get past Rosetti, who is an absolute psychopath with a chip on his shoulder. Slater and Eli don't frighten Gyp one bit. Though I think they planted the seeds for Richard forming an alliance with Nucky last night ...

 

He also got whacked pretty early in "Once Upon a Time in America." Needs to talk to his agent.

 

A lot of the commenters on Sepinwall's blog are panning this one, and I understand that. I just think last night's episode was a (cue the SportsJournalists.com joke) this-sets-up-the-rest-of-the-season-nicely episode.

The Gyp thing is cute until it cuts into Rothstein's profits. Then Rothstein will blow his top, probably at Nucky. I get that people think that Gyp is too cartoonish. But I think the writers are setting Gyp up as such a ticking-time-bomb wild card that no one knows what to do with him. It's easy enough to say, let's whack him, but I don't know how easy that is to do. His crew is more violent than anyone else's crew on the show. I like Owen Sleater's facial expressions when Gyp is in the room ... like he's trying to process and gauge just how to handle this sociopath.

Nucky is so distracted by his sham of a marriage to Margaret and his yearning for Billie Kent that this whole thing is going to blow up in his face spectacularly. Speaking of Margaret, I find myself wanting to look at my phone any time she's on screen. Her scenes are just so blah. Van Alden and Capone must end up together at some point. That's the only explanation for spending so much time with Van Alden in Cicero.

 

Way too much exposition. The Richard-Nucky-Mickey scene was great performance wise, but why would Richard do that? So Nucky would know (and the audience would know that Nucky knows) that Richard killed Manny. Why would Richard the character give a crap about that?
I don't like Gyp. I get that, on a show with cerebral villians, they want a sociopath that Nucky, Rothstein, etc. can't reason with. That being said, his intelligence sure seems to go up or down depending on the situation. He can figure out a pretty good tactical plan for stopping the flow of Nucky's booze and pick up on tension between Nucky and Gillian (and speak two languages, and make it this far in the underworld, etc.) but he's too dumb to understand much of anything else? And his first murder on the show was just dumb. How convenient he would kill someone on the drive to Atlantic City so we, the audience, could see what a psycho he is. He may has well have just worn a nametag.
Van Alden being in Illinois still makes zero sense. He is trying to avoid the FBI, yet he moved to the least likely city (outside of DC) in the country for that to happen. And he goes door to door each day and sees hundreds (thousands?) of people a day.
The best work they do is with Chalky and his family and the show does a masterful job of touching on a lot of black political/social themes of the era. I hope they do a lot more of that.

 

Did Nucky kill the little kid he kept seeing? Please explain. Thanks.

 

It's supposed to represent his guilt over killing Jimmy, whom he was a father figure to.