The allegations of sexual misconduct that got James Franco expunged from Vanity Fair’s annual Hollywood issue and disinvited from a New York Times speaking gig don’t seem to have affected his working relationship with HBO: Franco will return to The Deuce for its second season, as writer Megan Abbott told reporters at…
James Franco was honored with a Critics’ Choice Award last night for his work on The Disaster Artist, despite The Los Angeles Times publishing allegations from five women that he’d engaged in exploitative or sexually inappropriate behavior while they were his students or mentees. And it appears that HBO is also…
Clocking in at 70 minutes and change, the final episode of The Deuce’s first season stretches into its extra frames to bring some stories to a close, put ellipses on others, and indulge in a classic, The Wire-style bummer-parade montage. Maintaining the feeling of last week’s episode, it’s not all bad news set to Ray…
Here’s what’s happening in the world of television for Sunday, October 29. All times are Eastern. Don’t forget to pick up Halloween candy.
It’s still easy to rag on James Franco for acting like a pretentious grad student a few years ago, but it’s time to acknowledge the dude deserves our respect. Even if you didn’t like his brilliant turn in Spring Breakers, his reverent, nuanced performances in fare like 11.22.63 and The Deuce are proof that he isn’t…
It’s a strange sensation, feeling hope for the characters of The Deuce as an episode winds to a conclusion. But there it is: Ashley’s leaving town, Eileen’s taking control behind the camera, Alston has reasons to feel optimistic about his time at the one-four and about his relationship with Sandra. Things are working…
Here’s what’s happening in the world of television for Sunday, October 22. All times are Eastern. What’s that behind you?
“Payoff” is the long con of serialized television. Anybody who’s watched a show that’s trying to be the next Breaking Bad, the next Mad Men, the next Sopranos, hell, the next Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, has felt the cheat. You give the show regular installments of your time, be they in weekly allotments or in big,…
Halloween draws nigh, and with it the annual parade of ghosts and goblins, trolls and Trumps, pumpkins and David S. Pumpkins, and other, equally obvious guises drawn from the well of contemporary pop culture. But you read The A.V. Club (or, at least, you scroll past it on the way to the comments). Your refined tastes…
The “Emmy for Maggie Gyllenhaal” train was already speeding its way down the tracks, and “What Kind Of Bad?” heaps a whole mountain of coal into the engine. Gyllenhaal shines in an episode that’s both a restatement and a validation of her character’s m.o., giving us Candy’s side of the story from beneath the jabbering…
Here’s what’s happening in the world of television for Sunday, October 8. All times are Eastern. I don’t feel tardy.
Chris Alston scans the line of property voucher-less women at the precinct, and Sandra Washington sticks out. She’s a new face, but there are other reasons she doesn’t fit in among the sex workers corralled for the latest round of show-and-prove. To my untrained eye, it was the fact that she’s dressed to…
Here’s what’s happening in the world of television for Sunday, October 1. All times are Eastern. “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”—William Faulkner
There are plenty of smooth-talkers on The Deuce, but the show’s third episode prefers to be direct. In an episode titled “The Principle Is All”—so named for the ironic words of a guy who’s just broken the Mann act—Candy lays it out flat to a potential john with expensive tastes: “How do I know? Because nobody actually…
On last week’s episode of The A.V. Club Hosted By John Teti—which airs Thursday nights, only on Fusion TV—TV editor Erik Adams and host John Teti discussed the big fall TV shows of 2017. In this outtake, Adams and Teti go a little deeper on what Adams considers one of the best new series of the year. David Simon and…
Having been sufficiently reassured that it doesn’t have another Vinyl on its hands, HBO has renewed David Simon and George Pelacanos’ The Deuce for another season. That’s according to Variety, which also quotes co-creator Simon as saying with characteristic straightforwardness, “HBO is a serious outfit. And they don’t…
You can’t bring up the words “brown paper bag” on a David Simon show—as tonight’s episode of The Deuce, “Show And Prove,” does, in reference to Fat Mooney’s under-the-counter wares—without also invoking the wise words of the great Howard “Bunny” Colvin.
It’s hard to outdo the mix of humanity and tragedy in the conclusion of A Tale Of Two Cities, but David Simon and George Pelecanos sure try—and they put Sydney Carton’s trip to the guillotine in there to boot. Midway through the pilot of The Deuce, a prostitute and one of her regular clients watch the conclusion of…
“The fair-yet-wrong criticism leveled at The National over the years has been that all of the band’s records sound the same (or, worse and even more wrong, that they’re boring and they all sound the same). Sleep Well Beast probably won’t change the minds of naysayers, though it may earn the asterisk of being ‘the one…
In The Deuce, his latest examination of social ecosystems in this country, David Simon takes a typically granular and decidedly unglamorous look at the legalization of pornography in 1970s New York. The drug-slinging game of The Wire has been replaced with prostitution, a business with every bit as expansive and…