David Simon: HBO's new show 'The Deuce' is really about ... business
You may have heard that writer/producer David Simon’s new HBO (TWX) series, “The Deuce,” is a knock-dead dive into the ultra-sleazy world of Times Square porn in the 1970s. Which in fact it is. But if all you take away from the show is steaminess and grit—or are even merely seduced by the usual incredible Simonesque characters—you’re missing the big picture.
To me “The Deuce” seems to be all about, well, business!
OK, sure I’m a financial journalist. And you know the line: “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like nail.” But when I put this supposition to Simon, he lit up.
“Thank you for noticing that,” he said. “I guess I have to come to Yahoo Finance and places like that … Yeah, this is a piece about capitalism.”
‘A critique of market-based logic’
Let me pause for a disclosure. Simon and I worked together on our high school newspaper, the Bethesda-Chevy Chase Tattler, (Bethesda, Maryland) in the 1970s. He swears I mangled his first piece of copy as his editor, which sounds about right. David became a force-of-nature reporter at the Baltimore Sun and then made himself into perhaps the best show-runner in television and created the best TV show in history, “The Wire.” And he picked up a MacArthur “genius” award along the way.
OK, back to the story. Let’s start with a bit more on the show. “The Deuce” stars Maggie Gyllenhaal as a streetwalker with a plan (her sex scenes are incredibly graphic but hardly sensual—hence the plan) and James Franco playing identical tough guy twins. And there are a dozen or so other Characters (yes, with a capital “c”) to get wrapped up with. The conceit of “The Deuce”—street slang for 42nd Street—is really about the inception of the modern porn industry in America. But that’s just the surface.
All of Simon’s shows—from “The Wire” to Treme” to “Generation Kill”—are built layer upon layer. Simon puts real nuance into his stories and characters—many of whom are semi-fictionalized—with more shades of gray than blacks and whites. For instance, listen to what Simon says when I ask him to elaborate about the aforementioned business theme of The Deuce:
“[‘The Deuce’] is a critique of a market-based logic that I think has prevailed almost to the exclusion of other metrics in terms of how we measure our society,” Simon says. “There’s a libertarian notion of our markets will show us the true value of things since the 1980s. So here’s an interesting allegory. Here’s a moment where something isn’t a legal product and then suddenly it is. Let’s follow the money and see who gets paid…who gets exploited, who gets left out, what happens to labor, what happens to capital.”