It's 1920 in Atlantic City; prohibition has just begun, and city treasurer Enoch "Nucky" Thompson (Steve Buscemi) sees nothing but opportunity in the new business of bootlegging. Nucky's story is being given a huge push by HBO, to the point of hiring Martin Scorsese to direct the pilot. And while we get Scorsese's usual visual flair, the storytelling is rather overstuffed and hectic to the point of being incomprehensible.
We meet an enormous number of characters in the first episode. Jimmy Darmody (Michael Pitt, looking more than ever like the poor man's Leonardo DiCaprio) is Nucky's frustrated lieutenant, just home from the war and feeling that his experience there has prepared him for more than the relatively menial tasks Nucky entrusts to him. Margaret Schroeder (Kelly McDonald) is a pregnant housewife who comes to Nucky seeking a job for her husband. Van Alden (Michael Shannon, whose inherent creepiness works well here) is the Federal agent responsible for enforcing prohibition. Tthat doesn't even start to get into the assorted gangsters and mobsters who work in Nucky's organization, or the folks from Chicago and New York who show up hoping to make deals.
And it's with those gangsters that the first episode fails in the storytelling department. There's a storyline involving the theft of a shipment of Canadian Club that is utterly incomprehensible; I had no idea who had stolen the booze from whom, or who had ratted to the Feds. (Thank goodness for Alan Sepinwall's review, which clearly explains what the heck happened.)
The show looks spectacular, and the cast is filled with superb character actors. I'm still slightly skeptical about Buscemi as a leading man, particularly as a heavy, and the storytelling is going to have to be clearer or people will lose patience very quickly. There's enough promise here, though, to catch my interest for another week or two.
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