TV Review: Boardwalk Empire’s Third Season

Boardwalk Empire is a show that I should love, but don’t. It’s a show I want to like more often than I really like. And it’s a show I root for more than I really look forward to. That’s because I know the show has been right on the edge of being a great show for so long, that it now seems unlikely it’ll ever reach full potential. And I can’t imagine ever getting to a place where I’m waiting for each episode with baited breath; the way I do Breaking Bad or, when it was on, The Sopranos, which Boardwalk Empire clearly wants to be the successor to.

Too many episodes and situations end in an anti-climax, with extreme, seemingly-arbitrary brutality befalling minor or unimportant characters, while an enormous main cast always manages to skate by without losing their lives. That was particularly jarring this season, as there were (at least) four main locations being used between New Jersey’s growing boardwalk, the mean streets of New York, the meaner hallways of Washington D.C., and Chicago, where Al Capone has several near run-ins with fugitive ex-federal agent Van Alden, now going by the fake name of George Mueller.

The two dozen main characters usually prove too much for the show to juggle satisfactorily, with too many great characters getting sidelined for episodes at a time. Chalkie White and Richard Harrow played diminished roles this season, until the very last episodes. And Michael Shannon’s Van Alden, my pick for one of the greatest characters of 2011, was in less than half the season. [While the increasingly one-note Margaret dominates nearly every episode.]

All of this was done to make way for the season’s big villain, Gyp Rossetti, who, for me, was a big disappointment. He was just such a one-dimensionally hot-headed asshole, that he had none of the depth of the previous season’s “villains,” who, in different ways, were more likable than our hero, Steve Buscemi’s frosty Nucki Thompson, whose hands were dirtier this year than they’ve ever been.

The best new aspect of this season was watching the Harding administration unravel from the inside, as Buscemi’s Thompson had to use a crafty conman of a judge (the great Stephen Root) to play the shady Attorney General and the more seemingly respectable Treasury Secretary off each other. Even more remarkable is that all of this was apparently based on fact. On that level, Boardwalk Empire excels, by showing us that, historically, the line between crime lord and titan of industry aren’t as far removed as we’d like to think. Grade for the season: B…Grade for the season finale: B+ (which was enjoyably action-packed and full of double crosses)