Get Nucky: BOARDWALK EMPIRE and the Need For Mourning Who Main Characters Used To Be

Boardwalk Empire is coming back to HBO for a final season. I’ve written about the show for Previously.TV, but I haven’t talked about it here, mostly because while I like and admire Boardwalk quite a bit, I’ve never loved it — and I also haven’t grasped why that is. But now Ben Blacker, host of the always-terrific Nerdist Writers Panel has sat down for a one-on-one with Boardwalk‘s creator, Terence Winter, and in the first five minutes, I understand why I’ve never connected fully with Boardwalk Empire‘s main character, Nucky Thompson.

Blacker: I want to talk about the beginning of Boardwalk. What story were you setting out to tell?

Winter: The beginnings of organized crime were very interesting. Especially just having come off The Sopranos, where […] one of the first things Tony every says is, “I feel like I came in at the end of something. […] Literally, Prohibition was the single event that made organized crime possible, made millionaires out of criminals overnight, practically.”

That’s background for what comes next:

Winter: The character of Nucky [Thompson] was fascinating to me. The real Nucky Johnson was a guy who was a fairly low-level corrupt politician, albeit very successful — county treasurer of Atlantic City who basically got a piece of every county job and city job and was pocketing a lot of money. He lived very well. He was this guy who was, for the most part, “an honest guy,” compared to a lot of people we’d regard as criminals. […] He’s in charge of a town that’s on the Atlantic Ocean. And suddenly, alcohol is made illegal. Overnight, this man is so popular, because every criminal in the country wants to be friends with him, because he’s buy-able, and that’s where the alcohol comes in, right through that ocean. So suddenly, he’s got to change his entire outlook on things and change his game. And the question is, How is this going to corrupt him? And it’s [Boardwalk] really an exploration of that man and America and how things are changing, and really the dawn of the modern age and how alcohol and organized crime sort of went hand-in-hand.

I hear that and think: Well, where’s THAT show? Where’s THAT Nucky? Because that sounds GREAT!

But why? What’s different about what Winter’s describing vs. what we’ve seen?

To understand this, you need to know the first episode of Boardwalk Empire. When we first see Nucky, he’s delivering a speech to a women’s temperance movement. In the very next scene, he’s at a bar, ordering whiskey. That night, Prohibition will go into effect. Meaning: Nucky’s already made the choice to become a part of this, a major player, which means he’s already (offscreen) made a bunch of major changes in his life. Look again at Terence Winter’s words:

So suddenly, he’s got to change his entire outlook on things and change his game. And the question is, How is this going to corrupt him?

That’s a great question, right? Because themes themselves often come from questions. But who’s the him who’s being corrupted? We don’t know because Nucky’s already in pretty deep. He’s already in place to become a major player in the movement of and access to bootleg alcohol. He will get bigger — come season three, he’s basically living in a palace — but he’s already got a good deal of his machinery in place. Which means he’s largely shed that local glad-hander life he was leading before we even get to see it. He’s already a shark. Nucky’s made most of his big character choices before we meet him, and whatever comes next in his story will be echoes of those choices. There’s something about that that — for me — lacks urgency, power, essence.

I’m not saying Winter was wrong to start where he did — he’s a great writer, and he’s interested the new kinds of power created by this horrible national law. But for me it’s a missed opportunity, starting at the point of major change. For me, it keeps me from connecting with Nucky until much later. Why?

Because there’s nothing yet to mourn. If I’ve seen him as a local corrupt politician who was still basically harmless and maybe even a little naive, then when he becomes a super-ambitious, willing-to-hurt-people player, it’s not only exciting to watch, but I’m also able to mourn the smaller-but-better self he’s left behind.

It would turn Nucky Thompson merely from someone Winter needs me to be fascinated by (a gamble with any character) into someone I can be fascinated by and mourn at the same time. Mourning, I’m realizing more and more, is an essential facet of my relationship with characters in longform fiction. (This may be different for you.) But to experience that mourning, I need to know what’s been lost.

Does this sound familiar at all? What I’m describing — and what Winter is describing vis-a-vis Nucky Johnson — is basically what happens with Walter White in Breaking Bad. And listen: even I’m sick of thinking about Breaking Bad. But why that show works from the get-go is because we see who Walter White is before he makes his season-long transition into Heisenberg. The worse he becomes, the more exciting it is — but also the more we mourn who and what he’s left behind.

But with Nucky, we start with a guy who’s already made a lifetime’s worth of moral compromises in his drive to become the most powerful guy in Atlantic City. It’d be like starting Breaking Bad at the meeting with Tucco where Walt presents himself as Heisenberg and blows up the office to get back the meth that’s been stolen. Would it be an exciting start to the series? Sure. But it’d also be a wildly different series, and eventually you’d find yourself thinking: Well, what’s the big deal about Walt killing [REDACTED]? Wasn’t Walt always violent and unpredictable? Where Boardwalk starts — the eve of one man about to take a big bite of the world — is fantastic, intellectually. But it trades something more important, which is me, the viewer, worrying about a character.

The job of someone to mourn and worry about in Boardwalk Empire falls to Jimmy Darmody, played by Michael Pitt. Jimmy’s a smart young guy damaged by his time at the front in the Great War, and while that enables him to carry out the acts of violence Nucky doesn’t seem to have the stomach for, it also makes it difficult to connect with anyone, especially his wife.

Midway through that first season, Boardwalk does a crazy thing when Nucky sends Jimmy to Chicago until the heat dies down from an unauthorized — and very bloody — heist Jimmy orchestrated with a young Al Capone. This seems ill-advised: we barely know Jimmy, and now we have to try and care about him in a whole separate context? And those first couple of Chicago episodes are very rough, as Jimmy falls in love with a prostitute and succumbs to a morphine addiction — which, again, would be one thing if we knew Jimmy, but we just don’t, not yet. He’s been set up as the show’s Tragic Figure, and we’re expected to take that at face value.

But an inspired thing happens in Chicago. Jimmy meets fellow veteran Richard Harrow (aka the guy with the mask) and suddenly, with the warmth and connection between Jimmy and Richard, we find some warmth and connection to Jimmy. We see him in a way we simply weren’t seeing him in Atlantic City, because his relationships (with Nucky, with his wife, with his inappropriately sexual mother) were already fractured before we started. When Jimmy and Richard return to Atlantic City, suddenly all of it’s thrown in to relief; all of it makes sense.

Now contrast Jimmy’s evolution with the season one plot where Nucky courts Margaret Schroeder, a poor Irish immigrant married to an abusive German. He pursues her — later, he’ll marry her — but we never know how he feels about Margaret. Does he ever really love her, or is he just lonely? Everyone in Nucky’s life is there either to keep him company or because he hopes they’ll be useful, but for a good, long while there’s never that one person who means anything to him. In fact, it took until season three for the show to give that to him in the form of Billie Kent. So the character of Nucky is always fascinating but for me he’s rarely satisfying. You’re always watching his interactions, waiting for that twinge of disappointment as you realize that yet again, he’s got an angle. But I don’t know what’s beneath the angles.

This idea of mourning is important to a show like The Killing — a show where half the screen time in its first two seasons is all about literal mourning, yet where the audience never connects. Why? Because all we hear is how much everyone misses Rosie Larsen, but we never get to know her ourselves. So while I have no doubt the (television) hours spent with characters staring off or breaking down are full of verisimilitude, it doesn’t ever translate into anything for the viewer other than a grim, grey slog. By cutting you out of its storytelling, the show is asking you to just be sad about sadness already!, and to let that be enough. Contrast this with The Killing‘s third season, where we become immersed in the community of teenage Seattle runaways AS they’re hunted by an apparent serial killer. We’re given something to care about, in other words, not just told we should, and it makes for a vastly better season of television.

So what about Mad Men? Doesn’t that also start well after our main character has made his first big compromises? It does. But Mad Men also starts with a mystery: Who is Don Draper? Can he really be as amazing as he seems? Why do we get almost all the way through the first episode without knowing he’s married and has kids? And in episode three, why does a guy on the train call him “Dick Whitman”? So from moment #1, you’re wondering: Is this guy for real? And very quickly, you realize: hey, there’s something off. And that keeps you hooked while the show allows you to see the cracks in Don Draper, and you realize there’s someone very small and frightened in there, and how did he get here? You mourn, in other words.

That mystery is the magic ingredient in both LOST and Orange Is The New Black. Both shows feature large, diverse groups who’ve been marooned far from regular society. Both shows rely heavily on flashbacks — one per character per episode — that slowly reveal who these people were before we met them. In other words, who we should be mourning. Sometimes, it’s not so sad. OITNB‘s Red, like LOST‘s John Locke, has found her best self in exile. Other times, as with Poussey or Janae, we learn that they were so sweet and guileless in their former lives that it’s heartbreaking to see them have to survive in prison.

It’s an ongoing question, isn’t it? When to start a story? And television has definitely embraced the concept of en media res — in the middle of things — on both a series and an episodic level. But sometimes there’s another value to consider: the value in letting us see how things were before they went batshit. Terence Winter talks about it himself in the Writers Panel interview, when he recounts reading Syd Fields’ Screenplay book and realizing Fields’ dictum — that the main character get sideswiped by fate around page 30 — is borne out in Rocky. Rocky’s a nobody, a bottomed-out bruiser and loan-shark enforcer who nonetheless keeps training and fighting. And it’s true: page 30 is the start of the scene where Apollo Creed and his management team decide Creed needs to fight an interesting nobody in his next bout. Ta da!

But why this works is because it’s not on page one. By the time Creed and his team hit on this idea, we’ve seen Rocky in his starting place, in the rut he’d be in forever if Fate didn’t suddenly come barreling along.

I really would love to have first seen Nucky Thompson in that same rut as Rocky Balboa, a well-off but restless Atlantic City official, happy to be a part of everyone’s action, but wondering if this was going to be as good as it gets. I guess now that I know the backstory, I can try and keep all that in mind as I watch. (And I do look forward to season five.)