Where Have All the Gangsters Gone? What the End of "Boardwalk Empire" Signals for TV

Will TV gangsters be extinct after 2014?

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Complex Original

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A serial killer’s next victim is discovered. Superheroes wage big-screen battles on small-screen budgets. A Shonda Rhimes heroine handles her business while Twitter swoons. These are the sights and sounds of anticipated TV for 2015. Notice what’s missing? No 10 vs. 10 squad standoffs. No hits. No tense sit-downs discerning which crew gets what territory. Next year, the gangster will be dead. 

In the words of HBO new-class veteran Boardwalk Empire, no one goes quietly. Indeed, this fall some of contemporary cable’s most infamous Bad Boys™ are exiting TV quite loudly. But when the dust settles, beginning with Boardwalk’s series finale on Sunday and culminating with FX’s Sons of Anarchy in early December, there’ll be no one left standing. Sure, Nucky Thompson may live to self-loathe another day and Jax Teller may ride his Harley into the sunset with what remains of his family—but they’ll nevertheless be joining Tony Soprano, Walter White, and Al Swearengen in the malcontent white-guy-leading-a-life-of-crime purgatory in the sky. The TV Gangster as we know it will effectively be no more.

Of course, gangster is a broad, all-encompassing term. Deadwood’s Al Swearengen predates organized crime by nearly a century, and Jax Teller would profusely remind you he’s in a “club” not a “gang.” But the facts remain: antihero leading men inclined to bust shots when conflict arises have been endangered for some time now. And by the winter of 2015 they may be—the most compelling ones at least—completely extinct.

Spearheaded by Tony Soprano, TV’s latest golden age was inarguably built on the morally ambiguous male antihero’s back. The rise of premium, pop-culture impacting cable dramas bore direct fruit from the nation’s sudden obsession with, as author Brett Martin has labeled them, Difficult Men. And as Tony proved, the most easily marketable, most promising success replication of the antihero formula, is to make that difficult man a criminal.

Much of the memorable TV from the early aughts to now was led by men operating in some type of outlaw fashion, tapping into the nation’s sudden thrill with leading men whose actions dared you to champion them. For every borderline sociopath operating in corporate America (Don Draper) or government job (Frank Underwood), there was a Walter White transforming into the southwest’s Scarface or morally-conflicted-turned-full-on-bad-dude Jax Teller looming larger. Breaking Bad might be the most critically acclaimed show with the equally rabid fan-base in recent TV history, while Sons of Anarchy’s cable ratings records come second only to The Walking Dead. The Wire, which quickly drew its curtain back to reveal itself as an examination of the American city’s modern decay, still never abandoned its surface appeal: the street-level drug-running operation that birthed Avon Barksdale, Stringer Bell, and Marlo Stanfield.

Then there's Boardwalk Empire, which after its finale Sunday, will have spanned nearly all of Prohibition. In that regard, it’s perhaps the quintessential gangster show, covering the events that paved the way for organized crime and allowed notorious figures like Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, and Bugsy Siegel to rise, thrive, and conquer. The de facto protagonist is Nucky Thompson (Steve Buscemi), whose series arc tracks his [d]evolution from sleazy politician to full on made-man. (He’s warned early in the first season that he “can’t be half a gangster.”) The series bounced between arcs tracking Nucky’s immersion into gangster life, the rise of the IRL characters, and— most compellingly—last season’s battle between the ideologically-opposed black gangsters Chalky White (Michael K. Williams) and Dr. Narcisse (Jeffrey Wright). The latter of which was a resounding #WellActually to other period shows that do everything but present a black perspective.


Boardwalk coasted along on the strength of decent critical acclaim, a few awards, and occasionally towering performances. Now, ironically, as the series comes to a close that showcases Lucky Luciano (Vincent Piazza) and Meyer Lansky’s (Anatol Yusef) efforts to jumpstart organized crime as we know it, the era of the antihero, and thusly, the gangster, is on curtain call. For every new show worthy of debating whether we’re still in a golden age or not, there’s a Mr. Me Too actively contributing to antihero fatigue.

Shallow carbon copies, like AMC's already-canceled Low Winter Sun and Showtime's tired-on-arrival Ray Donovan have both suffered from palpable fatigue from critics and viewers alike. While Ray Donovan averages 1.5 million viewers an episode, its ubiquity nowhere nearly matches that of its predecessors. Each new spin on the supposedly complex criminal has yielded increasingly diminishing returns—all archetypes and no depth. Meanwhile, fandom has shifted to just about every other genre, leaving even the above-average shows like Boardwalk, which averages two million viewers an episode, with only mid-level attention. (Compare Boardwalk's fanbase and pop cultural impact, for example, to its HBO peer Game of Thrones, a series with an average audience of 18.6 million viewers. Remember: they premiered seven months apart.) Whether due to quality or quantity or both, people are just tired of hanging out with gangsters. 

TV’s current slate of success has just about everything else covered, from fantasy (Game of Thrones, Outlander) to horror (American Horror Story, The Walking Dead). And, as previously mentioned, the superhero craze has spilled off of the silver screen into our homes, with Arrow, The Flash, and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. holding it down while Gotham struggles to find its way, and Netflix prepares to unleash original Marvel bangers like Daredevil. What's more, the showrunners behind the antihero age are also looking for new material. Boardwalk’s creator, Terence Winter, himself a lieutenant in The Sopranos' creative team, is already working on his next project: a '70s-era drama set in the music industry. And thanks to Shonda Rhimes, women and African-Americans are finally flourishing in leading roles (on Scandal and How to Get Away With Murder)—two demographics the antihero craze often—unfortunately—shut out. Meanwhile your aunts and uncles continue to let CBS thrive with vanilla procedurals that get higher ratings than anything else.

As TV programming and consumption grows, so too will the variety of genres to choose from. With hundreds of networks, a handful of streaming sites, and now entities like Playstation offering original series, the field may grow too wide for an era to ever be defined by a dominant genre-trend again. Although, DC and Marvel will undoubtedly try. The programming slate across streaming, broadcast, cable and pay cable all promise more of the same. The lone U.S. series that offers anything resembling a made man is Netflix’s British import, Peaky Blinders, featuring Cillian Murphy of 28 Days Later and Dark Knight trilogy fame. The reception has been positive, but compared to, say, 2008, the gangster climate is bare bones.

That's not necessarily a bad thing—trends change, and most important overall, the TV landscape is still exciting. But we'll never forget that this so-called golden age of TV was ushered in by the wiseguys. ​

Frazier Tharpe has seen and loved every gangster series named above but currently his favorite show is The Vampire Diaries. He tweets here.

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