The first season of The Deuce takes place over a period of roughly 18 months, from late 1970 to the middle of 1972. Change is a defining characteristic of New York, as any wistful essay about the city will tell you, and the series has its own quick, but significant, shift. When the season begins, The Deuce is primarily a show about the sex workers who roamed New York’s 42nd Street. At its close, commerce has moved from the streets to “parlors” and expanded to include filmed pornography, both financed by the mob. In the process, control has shifted from black pimps like C.C. (Gary Carr) and Rodney (Method Man) to white mobsters like Rudy Pipilo (Michael Rispoli). At first glance, the handoff seems inconsequential, exchanging one kind of lawbreaker for another—but The Deuce hints that it’s only the beginning of a much more fundamental transformation.
True to form for creators David Simon and George Pelecanos, The Deuce is a sprawling and leisurely ensemble piece, united more by location and social connections than an urgent problem to solve or climactic event to approach. The shift from one-on-one transactions to a nascent industry arrived almost imperceptibly: a crackdown here, a tentative gig there. Yet the end result is undeniably a New York that’s one step closer to the one we know today — one where Times Square is better known for its M&M emporiums than porn theaters and where sex work is kept far from the sensitive eyes of tourists and their children. It’s possible to read The Deuce as an early example of a phenomenon modern American city dwellers are all too familiar with; television’s foremost chronicler of urban life and the systems that govern it has finally given us a show about gentrification. The Deuce is to the commodification of public space as The Wire was to the war on drugs: a surprisingly accessible, fiercely intelligent, and subtly principled exploration of a macro issue on the most micro of levels.
Though this revolution is observed from the proverbial bottom, The Deuce regularly reminds its audience that its directives come from the top. The sea change begins around Episode 3, when beat cops like Officers Alston (Lawrence Gilliard Jr.) and Flanagan (Don Harvey) receive orders to treat their typical patrol area as a “no-go zone” for prostitution arrests. Quietly, law enforcement officers are told not to enforce the law, at least in this one strategic area; the NYPD has created an off-the-books red-light district, actively facilitating the sex industry as opposed to merely tolerating it. The result is something similar to The Wire’s fictional Hamsterdam, though with a more active agenda: Once the sex trade has been corralled into a concentrated area, it becomes even easier to push into the parlors.
It soon becomes clear what’s behind this unofficial shift in NYPD policy, which comes straight from its downtown headquarters. The mayor of New York City, John Lindsay, is running for president. To burnish his credentials as an effective civil servant, Lindsay wants to clean up the streets of New York—not so much to extinguish the sex trade, but enough to remove it from public view. This paves the way for a more discreet and sophisticated kind of black market: The pimps pay a protection fee to operate out of the parlors, free from police harassment; the mob collects the fee; and a portion of the profits gets passed right back to the police in the form of a regular bribe. Everyone profits.
Everyone, that is, except the pimps, who no longer serve a clear-cut purpose in this rejiggered economy. “Pussy’s still the pussy; money’s still the money,” sighs C.C. in the penultimate episode. “But the pimp? Who is he right now?” It won’t take long for employees to connect the dots and go straight to the parlor owners and porn directors who get them paid. Free agent Eileen (Maggie Gyllenhaal), now working as a high-end escort by night and a porn producer by day, already has. The Deuce is careful not to idealize the often abusive men who manipulate and exploit the women in their care; it’s also well aware that pimps weren’t pushed out by a mass moral awakening. They were simply eclipsed by a more powerful, entrenched, and sustainable set of overlapping interests.
Simon and Pelecanos have explored the idea of a quasi-legal free-for-all before: Season 3 of The Wire centered on the aforementioned Hamsterdam, the de facto open-air drug marketplace posited by Major Bunny Colvin in his famous paper bag speech as a means to free civil resources for nonviolent offenses. But Hamsterdam was an initiative taken purely in the interest of public health and safety, a quality that simultaneously helped it succeed in the short term and guaranteed its failure in the long. (Police-sanctioned heroin sales made for terrible official policy and even worse politics, serving no one except Baltimore’s most vulnerable, and least influential, citizens.) But The Deuce’s new status quo exists to benefit the already wealthy and established; any positives for the sex workers whose livelihoods are affected by it are purely incidental. That’s what makes the new arrangement’s success a near certainty, even if we didn’t already know the future of Times Square. Its rewards are reaped by those who, according to capitalism’s cruel calculus, “matter.” Both pimps and mob bosses are making money off of women’s bodies—but only one of those groups has managed to align itself with the de facto ruling class.
What that ruling class has wrought in the intervening decades is a landscape that would be almost unrecognizable to the characters of The Deuce, populated by homogeneous chains displacing standalone stores and foreign shell companies that let luxury condos sit empty, driving prices up for everyone. The knowledge its audience brings to the table about the current state of New York, and most metropolises overtaken in recent decades by a tidal wave of global capital, is part of what separates The Deuce from the rest of David Simon’s filmography, and what it adds to his career-long mission of chronicling the American city. From Homicide: Life on the Street to Treme, most shows associated with Simon have been studiously contemporary, documenting the likes of Baltimore and New Orleans as they currently existed. Recently, however, Simon’s work has pivoted towards the period piece. Show Me a Hero, the 2015 miniseries centered on a housing desegregation fight in 1980s Yonkers, derived much of its tragic tone from viewers’ awareness that America’s cities and suburbs remain far from integrated. The Deuce’s is significantly less melancholy, but a similar dramatic irony still furthers its ability to communicate the scope and magnitude of urban evolution. We’re not just watching it happen; we’re living in the result, where there are amenities aplenty (bank-branded bike shares, Wi-Fi on public transport) for the affluent and nowhere near enough essentials (affordable housing, accessible education) for those truly in need.
In this way, The Deuce gets at an aspect of gentrification no joke about third-wave coffee shops and fixed-gear bicycles can ever capture. The process of “renewing” or “reviving” a given place—loaded terms that often go hand in hand with rising rents, displacement, and increased surveillance—is always more than the sum of individual choices. It’s the consequence of intentional, high-level decisions that create the incentives that guide those choices. A mayor decides he wants to be commander in chief, and a dozen steps down the food chain, a pimp loses his ability to make a living. The show is still decades off from the fully corporatized version of Times Square, but The Deuce shows an area made that much more palatable to big brands and multinational investors.
Simon and Pelecanos’s greatest shared strength has always been translating history-book concepts into vernacular, human terms. A wonderful scene from The Deuce’s pilot has two pimps talk Nixon’s Vietnam policy in the middle of Port Authority; Treme turned a Mardi Gras celebration into a sudden meditation on Hurricane Katrina’s devastating impact on the city being celebrated; The Wire’s cold open boils down the myth of the equal-opportunity American Dream down to 70 seconds and a single card game. In its first season, The Deuce executed the trickiest version of that alchemy yet. This show isn’t sentimental about ’70s New York; in fact, it’s careful to show how the New York of the ’70s contained within it the seeds of the New York of the 2010s. As another great HBO drama foretold, the Wild West is often nothing more than a precursor to so-called civilization.
Disclosure: HBO is an initial investor in The Ringer.
