Television review: 'Boardwalk Empire'

Ratings for "True Blood," on the other hand, are fantastic, but the genre show about vampires and sex is merely good but not great and fluctuates in its creative achievements. No, what HBO needs is something that could become its next "Sopranos."

And that something appears to have arrived in "Boardwalk Empire," created by veteran Emmy-winning "Sopranos" writer Terence Winter and executive-produced by Martin Scorsese, who also directs the pilot and set the template for the look of the series.

"Boardwalk Empire" is set in Atlantic City, N.J., in 1920 and centers on the rise of organized crime during Prohibition. The people, they want their booze. And the gangsters from New York, Chicago and beyond know an emerging market when they see it. Though films have taken on this subject in the past, "Boardwalk Empire" is the first television series to tap into the genre and hit a gold mine of original, fresh stories.

Beyond that, if there was ever a channel that had money to spend on a costume drama, HBO is the place. And unlike Showtime's "The Tudors," this one will combine historical accuracy with the gravitas of well-drawn characters (though, in fairness, there was something joyously guilty about the slighter "Tudors").

Years of storytelling

What Winter has done with his writing and Scorsese has done with the look is to set up a template where you can see, almost from the first episode, plenty of opportunity for years of storytelling. The ensemble series is headed by Steve Buscemi, who plays Enoch "Nucky" Thompson, the treasurer of Atlantic City and the half-politician, half-gangster who runs the place. Like all truly intriguing characters, Nucky is more than just a greedy profiteer and elected con man skimming riches off a town known as "the world's playground." There's genuine humanity in him and, if not sweetness, then at least gentlemanly compassion for folks he thinks deserve it.

"Boardwalk Empire" deftly and beautifully re-creates the hotels, nightclubs, bars and shops along the waterfront and captures it all. Long before Atlantic City seemed like a cheesy tourist trap and second-rate Las Vegas, "Boardwalk Empire" depicts it as the pinnacle of opportunity and extravagance for all kinds of ordinary people. It's also the epicenter of illegal alcohol importing and, through Nucky's notorious handling of business affairs, a place where a lot of illegal activity can be transacted without bother. And if things do get bloody, well, there's a way around that as well.

Timeline is key

Like the first season of "Mad Men," perhaps the key element of "Boardwalk" is how it keenly sets the timeline. As HBO notes of 1920: "The Great War is over. Wall Street is about to boom, and everything is for sale, even the World Series. It is a time of change when women are getting the vote, broadcast radio is introduced and young people rule the world."

That roar that will come to define the 1920s starts in Atlantic City, when the balloons drop in celebration of the onset of Prohibition - and the opportunity of a lifetime.

Winter says more than 90 percent of "Boardwalk Empire" is based on real-life people and events. And sure enough, we meet the likes of young, soon-to-be bigger gangsters Arnold Rothstein, Lucky Luciano and Al Capone. But it's Nucky Thompson at the center of their Atlantic City solar system. Those locals we come to know in Thompson's orbit are his former protege Jimmy Darmody (Michael Pitt), a local mother named Margaret Schroeder (Kelly Macdonald), Nucky's mentor, the Commodore (Dabney Coleman), the showgirl Gillian (Gretchen Moll) and Chalky White (Michael Kenneth Williams), the leader of Atlantic City's African American community.

Well-drawn characters

One sign of any series headed to greatness is the immediate sense that there's a dense, broad grouping of well-drawn characters. There's a vibrancy to the stories in each "Boardwalk Empire" episode. With echoes of the gangland mentality of "The Sopranos" and the frontier recklessness of "Deadwood," HBO seems to have found in "Boardwalk Empire" a fertile, sprawling new franchise series.

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E-mail Tim Goodman at tgoodman@sfchronicle.com. Follow him at www.twitter.com/bastardmachine.

This article appeared on page F - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle