Envisioned as a three-season series set in three different periods of the 1970s and 80s, the first two seasons were set in 19 respectively, the third season (starting next September) is to be set sometime in the mid-1980s. The series, created by David Simon, the originator of the widely acclaimed HBO television series, The Wire, and George Pelecanos, one of Simon’s collaborators on The Wire and a successful crime novelist in his own right, was originally advertised as the story of the beginning of the porn film industry in 1970s New York.
The Deuce, HBO’s series about 42nd Street and its sex-oriented businesses recently completed its second season a third and final season will launch next fall. This was brought home to me recently when a 70-year-old retired professor of history said to me: “I know everything was so terrible in that period, but it was also incredibly exciting.” Objectively life in New York City during the 1970s and early 80s was pretty bad - high crime rates, rampant homelessness, loose trash everywhere, whole neighborhoods of abandoned buildings crumbling and burning - yet it was an incredibly creative time as well: in music, art, performance, theater and sexuality. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” The famous opening line of Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities certainly seems like an appropriate way sum up 1970s New York, but I cite it also because the novel itself comes up in The Deuce’s first season as a book that launches a young prostitute on the road to reading and going back to school.