This post contains spoilers through the November 6 episode of Boardwalk Empire.

It seems that giving birth has liberated Lucy, taken a literal weight off her body, and given her latent cleverness a motivating force. “Of course I fed her,” she snaps at Nelson, who assumes she’s neglecting their as-yet-named child. “What do you think I am?” And she’s blunt with him about the terms of their arrangement, telling him, “This is your baby. You bought it.” She’s more tender than that about the baby with Nucky, though, even if he starts their conversation by forcefully denying paternity. “I look like shit. She’s kind of cute, though. Ten toes and everything,” Lucy explains, setting up the scheme that will lead Nucky to try to blackmail Nelson with the knowledge of his illegitimate child. “Now, there’s someone else I’ve gotta make happy. And she’ll always be mine.”

In a way, there’s something sort of invigorating about seeing Nelson return from the land of hypocrisy to righteousness and stand up to Nucky’s attempts to weaken him further. But I’ll admit enjoying seeing him taken down a peg by Esther Randolph (the marvelously befreckled Julianne Nicholson) first. As the new lead investigator on the Nucky Thompson case, Esther’s a former radical who spent 10 years as “a public defender, representing draft dodgers and prostitutes.” And the collision between someone who’s been brought in to look unimpeachable and a man who thought he was unimpeachable and turned out not to be is inevitable and interesting. She’s less naive that he is — it makes sense that a woman who’s defended her clients against abuses of power would be less sanguine than the righteous man who works within the system. When Nelson complains that “the scales of justice are weighted down with graft,” she just raises her eyebrows and says, deadpan, “My, my. Isn’t that shocking.” But that flexibility also means that she’s prepared to help Nelson navigate his family problems so he won’t be vulnerable anymore.

And speaking of secrets, Margaret, it turns out, is stronger than we knew — if not actually who we thought we knew. “Would you have seen me off to the Magdalen Sisters and broken in the workhouse?” she asks her brother, who blames her for running off with his passage money to America and leaving their dying mother after she became pregnant out of wedlock. “The priests judged it fit correction,” he tells her, safe, if not prosperous, in his conformity. Later, he refuses her help, telling her, “I don’t hate you. I don’t feel much about you at all. I can’t accept the money. I don’t know where it’s from,” though he lets Margaret’s younger sister keep the gift of a novel from her estranged older sister. Who can deny a little girl who, after holding it in, bursts out “Send me books! I like anything with a horse in it!” And later, as if to reaffirm her commitment to make her own way, rather than living by anyone else’s rules, she does what she’s been wanting to do, taking Mr. Slater into her bed, a simultaneous rejection of her old country’s norms and embrace of the people created by them.

This post contains spoilers through the October 30 episode of Boardwalk Empire.

Boardwalk Empire may still have a lot of elaborately bloody maneuvering over control of the liquor trade, but it’s become about larger themes of guilt, innocence, and responsibility. And tonight, those pressures culminated in two confessions, one voluntary and complete if unclear, one coerced and honest, but incomplete. The state of Margaret and Nelson’s souls, and the pressures put on the United States Attorney General, make Nucky’s problems out as the minor distractions that they are.

Nelson’s confession to Rose is prompted by two events. First, there’s the unnerving sense that he’s settled into something like domestic tranquility with Lucy. When she whines that she can’t get comfortable, saying “I’m sorry, Daddy. It’s just…I want to be done with this,” Nelson may chide her first, reminding her of his colleague who remains horribly burned in hospital, but he says he’ll get her the lemons that are feeding her craving anyway. Then, when he visits said colleague (telling another agent that he’s alive because “He loves the lord, sir,” only to have that man remark that “It seems a pretty one-sided relationship.”) Van Alden said he thinks the man is accusing him from his hospital bed and calls Rose in a panic, saying he’s not worthy of her or his badge.
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This post contains spoilers through the October 23 episode of Boardwalk Empire.

This episode confirmed a suspicion I’ve had about Boardwalk Empire, which is that the parts of the show I’m most interested in aren’t the main conflict. I suppose I care that Nucky doesn’t go to jail, but I’m vastly more interested in Chalky, Angela, Margaret, and the state of Richard’s soul than I am in the blood feud between Nucky, his brother, and the son he’s cast out of his kingdom, as if Satan faced his own rebellion. There’s some interesting stuff about masculinity and the manifest corruption of the Harding administration going on in Nucky’s storyline, but I feel like the show doesn’t have exceptionally developed ideas about these things: rather than sifting through subtext to divine larger ideas, all I have to analyze is the show’s surface.

And surface becomes quite literally important in this episode when, after a melancholy suicide attempt thwarted by the appearance of man’s best friend, Richard comes back to himself by scalping a disappointed investor for Jimmy. His sitting for Angela was one of the best parts of the last episode, and there’s something lovely and sad about seeing him leaf through his scrap-book, a wistful reminder of a life Richard has decided is impossible for him. But there’s a lot of telling here, rather than showing. Some of it’s by necessity: flashing back to Richard’s past would have complicated an already overstuffed show. But I wish the show had found a way to do more than to have us watch Richard watching other things, that it didn’t need to be quite so obvious in its juxtapositions. We already know that Richard doesn’t see himself like Angela does, and that even she doesn’t see him as his old self: putting the two portraits side by side just reminds us of something we already know instead of giving us new information. The show is capable of doing better. In a nice exchange towards the end of the episode, Jimmy tells Angela “Nobody’s hungry. Nobody’s scared. What else is there?” “There’s got to be something. Hasn’t there?” Angela tells Jimmy. There’s a real tragedy here: Richard understands that something better than the man Angela is pledged to, but he isn’t physically whole in a way that Jimmy is. Neither man is complete enough for her, but only one man realizes it.
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This post contains spoilers through the Oct. 16 episode of Boardwalk Empire.

Tonight’s episode is all about knowing where you fit and the consequences of refusing or failing to fit into that role — and in one shocking reversal, a usurpation of the role someone else has established for you.

First, there’s Chalky, caught in an impossible situation after he gets out of jail. At first, things seem to be going well as he gives permission for an aspiring doctor to court his daughter and promising to help an elderly woman with noisy neighbors and a younger man with an abusive employer at a community meeting. But then, as that meeting’s almost over, the women of his community challenge not just Chalky’s conduct as a community leader but the very nature of his role. “Those white men cut his throat while he was loading your trucks with your illegal liquor,” one woman tells him bitterly. “You walk around, take a bite out of everyone else’s plate. Don’t get nothing back but a summer clambake and a Christmas turkey.” Largesse is not enough in the face of systematic racism, a point Chalky makes to Nucky later, who responds by insulting him, saying, “It’s always about money, Chalky…you can thank me by being a good boy. I gave you my word. Now save your strength. And enjoy your family.”

Is it any wonder Chalky melts down (after maintaining his composure earlier when his daughter’s request that he help her with her homework almost reveals his illiteracy) at that family dinner he’s supposed to be enjoying when his wife serves duck instead of Hoppin’ John to his daughter’s suitor so the family will look upscale? “It’s my house. And my country ways put the food on this goddamn table,” he curses, before declaring that it’s clear who the field hand in his house is and retreating to the garage while his family plays piano. The roles he’s being asked to play are impossible: his capacity for violence is critical until it’s shaming, his ability to earn buys his family’s passage into a future where he doesn’t have the skills to join them or to fit in. And I still can’t figure out his relationship with Nucky, who seems to regard Chalky as his equivalent, but lesser shadow, in a mirror, lesser land.

An outwardly sustainable relationship, Margaret and Nucky’s, appears tested this week as well. Nucky insists on giving bonuses to the servants despite Margaret’s insistence that they can’t really afford it. But when she gives them the money before warning of a coming pay cut, they aren’t grateful, and she resorts to brittleness with the women she was on the verge of drinking away her sorrows with last week: “I believe it’s customary to say thank you. What is it, ladies? Speak your minds.” When they tell her that a sloshed Nucky promises them raises, Margaret says coolly, “Well, it’s a special kind of fool who relies on the promises of a drunkard.” And later, she asks Nucky for $100, ostensibly for new clothing for the children, but mostly to see if she can get it.
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This post contains spoilers through the October 10 episode of Boardwalk Empire.

As a Boardwalk Empire newbie who’s shotgunning the series all at once, one of the things that stands out most about the show is its manneredness, its theatricality. Sometimes this works beautifully: Steve Buscemi’s very good at pulling off slight strangeness or outsizedness and making it seem natural, while Kelly Macdonald’s very good here precisely because she’s a bit of a neutral agent. She can do things like sneak into Nucky’s offices by pretending she’s a pregnant, itinerant Irish girl: she’s good at seeming invisible when it counts. But it doesn’t always work well, and last night’s episode focused on two characters where I think the mannerdness of the show doesn’t necessarily work very well: Lucy and Nelson.

I should make no bones of the fact that I think Paz de la Huerta isn’t a very good actress period, and in this role, she’s playing a character who is flighty and maybe doesn’t have much education or sense as if she’s stupid to the point of disgust. When she whines to Nelson that “I wanna go out…That neighbor lady stopped by the other day. She invited us for dinner…a simple dinner. Some conversation. Some music, for god’s sake…a Victrola…I used to be out every night in the week…Say what you want about Nucky, at least he was fun,” it’s hard not to feel anything but contempt for her. Has she managed to learn absolutely nothing about Nelson in the months he’s effectively kept her locked up in? Does she genuinely have no idea that there is precisely nothing in that whine that will move a man who, as he explains to her, without judgement of his parents, “was taken to a Christmas pageant by an aunt in 1894. When my parents found out, they broke off all relations.”
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This post contains spoilers through the October 2 episode of Boardwalk Empire.

This week’s episode was all about the gap between how people see themselves and how others see them — and when people decide to bridge the gap. Jimmy, Margaret, and Nucky all got understimated tonight. But only one of them made full strategic use of that misunderstanding.

First, Jimmy approaches Arnold Rothstein on behalf of the Commodore to try to cut Nucky out of the liquor business. “Don’t even pretend you’re inclined to be warm towards me. I wouldn’t insult you like that,” Jimmy tells him. “I have great respect for you. Your wisdom. Your achievements.” But instead of responding to the proposal, Arnold assesses Jimmy himself. “You’re better-spoken that I expected…You show up well-dressed, with a silk cravat and a proposal. A year ago you were a brigand in the woods.” Jimmy gives him the most anodyne version of his biography, telling the gangster that “I’m a businessman. A veteran. I just got married. I have a son. He’s four years old.” His smoothness gets him through the meeting and a promise not to be ratted out, but not a deal. And later, it gets him into a discussion of joining the heroin trade, into and out of a card game, and finally, in a cemetery at midnight, surviving a frisking long enough to kill both men. It’s hard to imagine that he won’t be discovered, that his lethality will be, if not a matter of public record, a more broadly-known piece of knowledge than it was previously, which may or may not be to his long-term advantage.

Chalky goes through a similar process when, after his wife visits him in prison, a fellow black inmate begins to harass him. Before that, he’s underestimated by Nucky, who assumes he doesn’t know the meaning of the word precarious. When he’s moved into the man’s cell (“Can’t be mixture of the races,” the warden says, apologetically.), the man beings needling him, first asking Chalky what the name of the book his son sent him is (it’s David Copperfield, but Chalky says it’s Tom Sawyer, revealing he can’t read), then trying to bait him into admitting his illiteracy by asking him what a line says. “That say get your finger out of my face,” Chalky sticks stubbornly to his story. And finally his cellmate pushes Chalky too far. “Bright-skinned bitch you strut around with. The uppity way you try to tell the world you better,” Don complains, “when all you be is another jigaboo in a jail cell.”
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I’ve been so focused on this fall’s crop of television shows about women that I haven’t spent that much time checking out the roster of shows about How to Man Correctly. The always-excellent Linda Holmes at NPR makes a persuasive argument that for once, television is actually handling men worse than it’s handling women. So if you don’t want to watch How to be a Gentleman but do to think about masculinity, try one of these currently airing shows — or watch them with a new focus.

1. Parks and Recreation: I give this show infinite props for its awesome feminism, but it’s actually a stealthily terrific show about what it means to be a man. From Tom, who thinks the road to happiness lies through the achievement of a particular lifestyle; to Ben who’s trying to prove that he’s worthy of responsibility after a burst of teenage arrogance; to Andy’s maturation from unemployed lump to husband, the show is all about how to be a grown-up man without any resort to extreme violence or Pickup Artist-style womanizing. And that doesn’t even get us to the Swanson Pyramid of Greatness:

The only thing that even comes close is Jack Donaghy’s video for his unborn son. But on 30 Rock, Jack’s really the only man, so there isn’t much of a conversation about masculinity.

2. Breaking Bad: I sort of assume everyone here is watching Breaking Bad already, but in a way, it’s a perfect dramatic counterpoint to Parks and Recreation. Walter White’s journey from decent cancer victim to monstrously pathetic wannabe kingpin is fundamentally steered by a toxic conception of masculinity: that he should be willing to do everything to provide for his family. That rationale’s evolved from a motivation for Walt to cross a previously unthinkable line to an excuse for him to behave terribly. As Skyler, Walter’s wife told him this season, “someone has to protect this family from the man who protects this family.”
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A quick note: I’m not caught up on the first season of Boardwalk Empire yet, though I hope to be by next week. So please excuse any errors, omissions, generalized confusion, etc. I’ll be up and running soon, I swear! This post contains spoilers through the first episode of the second season of Boardwalk Empire.

As a first time Boardwalk Empire watcher, one of the things that struck me most strongly about the show is the extent to which it feels like reading a Little Orphan Annie comic strip. Everything’s a bit of a cartoon, whether it’s the Commodore dashing about his living room with a spear, Jimmy’s mother’s cartoonishly poisonous sweetness towards his new wife, or the show’s racial politics, even when they’re relatively good.

One thing I thought the show did very effectively in that early scene when the Klan attacks Chalky’s operation was to communicate the simultaneous menace and goofiness of the Klan. “Purity, sobriety, and the white Christians’ Jesus,” is a stupid-sounding phrase even within the context of the time. But uttered by a man who’s just shot your warehouse full of holes with primitive automatic weapons, the conviction of that ridiculous phrase actually makes the people uttering it more terrifying. They’re driven to all of this by a flimsy, incoherent cant.

It’s also interesting to see Michael K. Williams, who played the ultimate loner as Omar, have a constituency as Chalky. And even more interesting to see him carve out the best of multiple bad options in what’s essentially a no-win scenario.”I got four boys dead in that warehouse. Half a dozen wounded. Including a woman,” he tells Nucky, sick to death of Nucky’s promises to take care of yet another problem that for Nucky is a business impediment, and for Chalky is a matter of life or death. “How’m I supposed to know that?…I’m done with this shit. I got my family and I got my people…The ten thousand black folks who make this city home, busboys, porters…you go school these crackers less you all find out…You ready for what happens here? I turn up on the end of a rope?” He’s offering himself up as a firewall, a sort of flawed martyr. Chalky can hold back the black community in Atlantic City for a while, but what he’s promises Nucky is sort of an inverse of the crucifixion. White Atlantic City residents essentially have to take the bet that if they hang Chalky, their city won’t explode.
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