A review of tonight’s The Deuce coming up just as soon as Jerry Van Dyke stops by for a mai tai…
“Didn’t you always want to be in the movies?” –Loretta
The Deuce is a show about the selling of sex, and it’s much more interested in the selling than the sex itself. Having established most of its major characters and the world they occupy in the premiere, “Show and Prove” takes pleasure in drilling down to the specific details of how money gets made, what the rules and traditions are, and how trouble is best avoided.
The episode’s title comes from the police ritual that we see Alston and Flanagan act out in the opening scenes. Prostitution is illegal, so theoretically cops should be able to arrest any sex worker parading their wares out on the street, but this would be overwhelming to the system — not to mention rough sledding on the women doing work that most of the cops aren’t too troubled by — so there’s a grace period where those who were arrested on the last sweep of the Deuce are allowed to go free on the next one. (“Show and prove” means they are giving the cops a property voucher confirming they were in police custody in the last few days.) The whole thing is arbitrary and pointless, but it’s the way the system works, and as we learned so often on The Wire, systems don’t often change, even for logic. So some of the women get rounded up and brought to the station — the sequence where Alston orders them all take-out and eats it with them in the precinct courtyard is both extremely charming and a mark of how little Chris and other cops seem to think the hookers need to be locked up — and then it’s someone else’s turn the next time. You can see Chris being annoyed by having to shove this particular bolder up the hill in this way, and when Rodney taunts him in the closing scene with a chant of, “The hos go in, the hos go out,” Alston decides to lock everybody up for once, to stick to the actual letter of the law rather than the way he’s been trained to enforce it.
Meanwhile, we see Lori getting a crash course in her trade from C.C., who keeps insisting that her time in Minnesota was like playing in Little League, and tries walking her through minutiae like dick drip. She keeps insisting she knows all of this, but his caution proves apt when she’s nearly abducted by a predator posing as a cop, with a fake badge she would have recognized if C.C. had remembered to show her what a real one looks like. It’s a startling moment — and a sharp contrast to what C.C. did to Ashley at the end of the premiere — and, like most of the episode, it’s focused on how the smallest of details can have enormous repercussions in a risky trade like this.
We also begin the series’ gradual transition into the business of pornography with a variety of story beats showing where that world intersects the work the prostitutes are doing. We see Ashley posing for a series of naked pictures to drum up business, and having to hide the scar in her armpit that C.C. gave her. Showing penetration onscreen is still against the law — the movie C.C. takes Lori to see edits around it, and the cops lock up sex shop owner Fat Mooney when they find he’s selling “loops” that don’t do the same — and the only rule about who gets paid for what seems to be that the performers get screwed in more ways than one. Darlene discovers that Fat Mooney has been selling a movie she made for him, and Candy notes that you get paid only once to star in one of these movies that could be making money over and over for whoever is selling it.
Yet it’s Candy who begins to see the possibilities in the field when Loretta asks her to fill in for her on a film shoot in the Bronx. The money is small, but Candy is fascinated with the process of it (using Campbell’s potato soup as a semen substitute after her male co-stars finish too quickly), and especially by the fact that a woman is a prominent member of the film crew. Candy has things to learn as an actress in these movies, like not looking at the camera, but already you can see her mental gears turning about what she might be able to do in this field, as opposed to alone on the Deuce. Loretta says she’s interested in getting off the streets, and it’s hard to blame her, especially after the incident with Lori and the fake cop.
Even the parts of the episode not directly tied to prostitution and pornography are focusing on how things get done. Vinnie’s leotard inspiration has turned House of Korea into a thriving enterprise, which is itself a mark of understanding where to draw the line on selling sex: as Vinnie notes, there’s a topless bar out by the airport, “but this is classier.” His work at the bar, coupled with his clever idea to both pay off Frankie’s debt to Tommy Longo and help out his construction boss brother-in-law Bobby with a logistical problem — having the mob front cash to the construction workers so they can cash their paychecks sooner, in exchange for a small percentage — attracts the attention of Gambino captain Rudy Pipilo, who wants him to be the frontman for a failed gay bar he’s bought in the neighborhood. Rudy at first asks what value Vinnie brings to their operation, but Vinnie’s answer — “I’m the manager. This place, every place I’ve ever worked.” — explains it simply: he keeps things running smoothly, no matter where or what. That’s a very useful kind of person to know, and Vinnie’s interest in rebuilding Penny Lane from the ground up — even as Frankie wonders why his brother would want to abandon the sweet life he has now — doesn’t feel that distant from the potential Candy sees for herself in the nascent porn business.
Late in the hour, a reporter — or, as she describes herself, an “oral historian” — approaches Darlene at House of Korea and tries to interview her about what she does for a living. Larry shuts it down and sends Darlene back out into the streets to make a buck. The reporter will have to wait for the details, but we get a whole lot of them throughout “Show and Prove.”
Some other thoughts:
* David Simon wrote one episode of NYPD Blue (and his pal, the late David Mills, wrote many of them), so I’d like to think that the fake cop’s use of the 15th precinct as his alleged home was a tip of the cap to Andy Sipowicz and the rest of the gang from the One-Five.
* In addition to Chris Bauer as Bobby (playing a union guy again!), “Show and Prove” brings in several more Simon show alums, including Michael Kostroff (Maury Levy on The Wire, and the brother of Deuce producer Nina Kostroff Noble) as desk cop Rizzi and Chris Coy (reporter L.P. Everett from Tremé) as Penny Lane bartender Paul Hendrickson. Ralph Macchio, meanwhile, is new to the Simon/Pelecanos orbit, playing plainclothes vice cop Officer Haddix, who has a running argument with partner Grossman (Brian Muller) about Jewish athletes.
* Another reunion: Richard Price co-wrote the script with Pelecanos, making for both a Wire reunion and another HBO project for The Night Of co-creator. For that matter, it’s old home week for Michael Rispoli, who plays Rudy Pipilo, was runner-up to play Tony Soprano, and played acting Family boss Jackie Aprile at the start of that series.
* We see a bit more of Candy’s mother taking care of her son, who thinks his mother lives in Washington and works for the government.
* The movie Lori and C.C. are discussing in bed is Klute, for which Jane Fonda won her first Oscar. That scene’s also notable for C.C.’s continued insistence on romanticizing the nature and uniqueness of his profession, insisting, “There ain’t no individual on Earth as alone as a pimp.” He believes this nonsense, even as we know he would never actually leave the game even if he found the “one good woman” he keeps hoping for.
* Last week, Abby walked out on a test, apparently because she felt she’d outgrown her classmates (and her professor). There are consequences to that, and here she flunks out of school and moves in with a friend, checking the want ads for work.
* This episode features one of the funniest jokes on the show so far: Larry is in the midst of attempting a soft-sell to get Candy into his stable, and trash-talking Rodney’s interpersonal skills as part of his pitch, only to lose his temper when Darlene sits down next to him before turning back to Candy, all smiles again: “Like I was saying, Rodney ain’t got no sensitivity to him.”
What did everybody else think?
Alan Sepinwall may be reached at sepinwall@uproxx.com. He discusses television weekly on the TV Avalanche podcast.