

However, casting him as Boardwalk‘s primary antihero Nucky Thompson was a gamble that just didn’t pay off.īoardwalk Empire was based on the true events chronicled in the Nelson Johnson book of the same name that it draws from. My dude rarely catches an L and is one of the more reliable performers out there on both the small and big screen. Boardwalk Empire could’ve been the show both HBO and audiences wanted it to be but had a few fatal flaws that prevented it from achieving that goal-especially these mistakes that came back to bite it in the end. As a result, the show failed to secure the same kind of legacy as Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and the other shows that defined the era of prestige television it’s simply an afterthought-if not a cautionary tale concerning the pitfalls similar shows should avoid. That wasn’t necessarily fair, but at the same time, HBO kind of did that to itself and practically set itself up for failure in the process. When you consider Boardwalk revolves around organized crime in the great state of New Jersey, it was only natural that it was compared to The Sopranos from the jump. That season’s finale saw 3.3 million tune in, a number that fell to 2.9 million when the second premiered (for context, the last season of The Sopranos boasted an average of eight million viewers per episode). However, it didn’t manage to keep its audience engaged after a premiere that drew five million people before its ratings began to decline at a steady pace. It’s worth noting it wasn’t a complete bomb from a critical standpoint, as It was nominated for 57 Emmys (winning 20 of them) and took home the Golden Globe for Best Drama in 2011. It may not have been a complete dud like John From Cincinnati but Boardwalk Empire’s failure to really grab hold of the zeitgeist and garner both consistent critical and general praise was fairly surprising when you consider it was seemingly destined to become The Next Big Thing.

HBO had missed before, so it’s not as if the network was batting a thousand. It saw a steady decline in quality over the course of the first three seasons, and while it picked up some momentum during the final two, it was too little too late. It wasn’t really that bad but it also wasn’t really that good one of those shows that hooks you just enough to keep you coming back every week but leaves you wondering why you did when the credits roll on the finale. To Boardwalk‘s credit, it never came very close to reaching “the last two seasons of Game of Thrones” levels of underwhelming but it also never managed to live up to its potential. The premise was also basically everything you could ask for: a gangster saga set in the 1920s that pulled from true events centered around the bootlegging operations overseen by legendary mobsters including Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, and Arnold Rothstein. Williams, who had last been seen playing Omar Little on The Wire.

It also featured HBO royalty in the form of Michael K. Showrunner Terrance Winter had served as a writer and producer on The Sopranos, Martin Scorcese directed the pilot, and Steve Buscemi was tapped to lead a cast that included notable members of the “That Guy (and Gal)” club, including Michael Shannon, Michael Pitt, Gretchen Mol, Kelly MacDonald, and Stephen Graham. On paper, Boardwalk Empire had all the makings of a hit. It hadn’t had much success finding a flagship drama to replace the show that arguably ushered in the Golden Age of television but it initially looked like it had found one with a program looking back at the Prohibition Era.
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The series premiered three years after The Sopranos came to an end, which marked the start of a weird period for the network, which was still a year away from getting the shot in the arm provided by Game of Thrones. On September 19, 2010, the first episode of Boardwalk Empire aired on HBO.
