A Man. And His Blog.

Atlantic City, 1920: Time to make some deadly and dangerous business

HBO is the richest TV channel in America, and it looks like that HBO is even the richest TV channel in the world. They don’t have any problems in lifting around $50 million to finance the 72-minute long pilot episode of their new TV series, building sets and costumes, getting the stars in front of and behind the camera, and advertising the hell out of it. Created and written by Terence Winter, who wrote and executive produced The Sopranos; directed by Martin Scorsese, the star director, who knows a lot about this time of area of corruption and dirty money laundry among criminals and mafiosi. Boardwalk Empire, an Atlantic-City-piece-of-history, before the Black Friday hit the world and practically ruined it, has any element known to man to be a successful series on HBO, but then there are still the high costs. Can Boardwalk Empire repeat the suddenly successful True Blood and regenerate most of its money to be the next big thing out there? Or will it end like Rome and Carnivale after two years – a fucking love child of all the critics and fans, but not good enough in its ratings and revenue that the series will be canceled after two seasons? But Boardwalk Empire and HBO don’t only have to ask themselves these questions. Is the series actually good enough to entertain me? After all I am one of the people, who doesn’t belong into any HBO fan group and basically doesn’t love half of the shows aired on the pay-TV channel (this year’s Treme was very difficult to get into for me, which is why I’ve canceled it after two episodes, hoping to get back to it after a while). Is Boardwalk Empire the first real one-hour series that will be on my all-time favorite list? The pilot episode says “I don’t really know”. I can understand all the positive buzz and awesome critics about the first episode. But I think that all of the critics should come off their horses for a moment.

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