"In its second season, David Simon and George Pelecanos’s The Deuce jumps four years ahead to 1977. To paraphrase one of Simon’s favorite novelists, it’s the worst and best of times. It’s an era of glitter balls, platform shoes, cocaine, and the open sale of sex. New York City is financially depressed and crime-ridden. Newly elected Mayor Ed Koch is pledging to clean up midtown and make it safe for tourists, a mission established in Sunday’s season premiere, “Our Raison d’Etre,” when detective Chris Alston (Lawrence Gilliard Jr.) investigates the stabbing death of a Kmart assistant manager who drove in from Harrisburg to see Beatlemania. But Times Square, and the nightlife and leisure industries generally, are thriving.
Discos and punk clubs are packed. Eight years after the Stonewall uprising, gay and lesbian citizens are opening more spots that are designed to let them be themselves. Brothels are popping up all over midtown, shifting the flow of money from a rainbow coalition of streetwalkers and their African-American pimps to mostly middle-class, white ethnic owners and managers. Lush theatrical softcores like the Emmanuelle films are being shot on 35 mm. with gorgeous lighting and exotic locations. Newspapers are running ads for Rocky and The Party at Kitty and Stud’s side-by-side. PG-rated Hollywood films include topless scenes. Just seven years earlier, Midnight Cowboy, a Times Square–set drama about a gigolo and his con-man friend, became the first (and so far only) X-rated film to win an Oscar as Best Picture. We know from history books that this is the city’s Weimar era of sexual freedom, decadent to the point of naive innocence, and that the AIDS epidemic and a Giuliani-endorsed corporate takeover will finally end it. But the major characters of The Deuce have no way of knowing this. They’re more comfortably settled than in season one, which tends to happen when you aren’t looking over your shoulder every second. Their minds are abuzz with schemes to evolve. The show evolves with them."
