When The Sopranos ended in 2007, HBO had a problem it had never had before, which was the problem of following itself. The network had spent a decade defining what prestige television meant and had done it largely through one show, and the question hanging over the next few years was whether it could do that twice. The answer it put on screen in 2010 was Boardwalk Empire, a Prohibition drama set in Atlantic City, created by Terence Winter, who had spent seasons two through six writing for the most celebrated mob series ever made and collected four Emmys doing it. The pilot was directed by Martin Scorsese and cost a reported $18 million, the most expensive hour of television anybody had made up to that point. It was adapted from Nelson Johnson’s nonfiction history of Atlantic City, and it arrived carrying the production values of a feature film. Nobody had to explain what HBO was attempting. The comparison was in the building before a frame aired.
What is worth saying up front is that the comparison came from the press rather than from HBO. The network’s programming president at the time was careful to talk about quality rather than about hits, and no executive is on record calling this the next Sopranos. Critics made that call for them, immediately and everywhere. One of them opened his review by noting that the network that had given audiences a show about the mob was betting that crime would pay twice, and another described it flatly as HBO’s biggest and most expensive prestige project since The Sopranos went off the air. Sixteen years on, the interesting thing is not whether it replaced anything. It is that a show which arrived to that level of acclaim somehow slipped out of the conversation entirely, and that going back to it now makes the slip look like a mistake. The record of what actually happened is unusually well documented, which helps.
The easy assumption in 2010 was that Winter had written a period Sopranos, and the show spends its first season quietly refusing to be one. Its protagonist, Enoch “Nucky” Thompson, is a treasurer rather than a boss, a politician who launders violence through committee work and patronage, and Steve Buscemi plays him as a man whose menace is entirely administrative. Winter said before the premiere that anyone scratching their head at Buscemi carrying the show would stop by episode twelve, which turned out to be roughly accurate. The character is based on Enoch Johnson, the real Atlantic County political boss, with the surname changed and the biography loosened, and the series takes the same approach to the rest of history.
That approach is what separates it. Arnold Rothstein, Al Capone and Charles “Lucky” Luciano are all in the show as young men still working out who they are going to become, played by Michael Stuhlbarg, Stephen Graham and Vincent Piazza, and the series treats their eventual fame as something the audience knows and the characters do not. It is a structural advantage no invented mob story has. Watching Capone as a loud errand runner in Chicago, decades of subsequent mythology sitting in the room with him, produces a kind of dramatic irony that the genre rarely gets to use. The show is not competing with its predecessor so much as working an entirely different seam.
There is a version of this piece that says the show was underrated at the time and has been vindicated since, and that version is false. The premiere drew 4.81 million viewers and was the strongest series launch the network had managed since Deadwood six years earlier. The network renewed it for a second season inside forty-eight hours. Reviews were close to uniform, and by the following January it had won the Golden Globe for Best Television Series in the drama category, with Buscemi taking Best Actor. The cast won the Screen Actors Guild ensemble award that year and again the year after. None of that is the profile of a show anybody overlooked.
The awards record across the full run is genuinely remarkable and also slightly strange. The series collected 57 Emmy nominations and 20 wins, which puts it in rare company. What it never won was Outstanding Drama Series, and only one of those twenty statues went to an actor, Bobby Cannavale in 2013 for playing Gyp Rosetti. The rest were craft: directing, cinematography, art direction, production design, editing, sound, makeup, hairstyling, visual effects. The Television Academy spent five years telling anyone paying attention that this was the best-made drama on television and simultaneously declining to call it the best drama on television.
The audience left slowly and steadily. Season 1 averaged 3.17 million viewers a week and season five averaged 2.01, a decline of roughly a third across four years, and the cultural conversation drifted with it. Part of that is simple bad timing. The show launched into a period when Mad Men and Breaking Bad were taking the prestige-drama oxygen, and by 2011, HBO had put Game of Thrones on the air and found the franchise that would define its next decade. A serious, expensive, deliberately paced period drama about municipal corruption was never going to win a volume contest against dragons. Some of it was self-inflicted, though, and the show’s own decisions are the honest half of the explanation.
The biggest was killing Jimmy Darmody at the end of the second season. Michael Pitt’s character had been the series’ engine, the closest thing it had to a conventional lead, and removing him produced real anger from the audience and left a hole the show never entirely filled. Winter defended it then and still does, on the grounds that the story had gone where it had to go, and the argument is defensible. It also coincides with the point at which critical scores dipped. The final season made a second hard choice, jumping forward seven years and running eight episodes instead of twelve, which asked viewers to reconnect with characters they had known intimately and now barely recognized. Opinion on the ending remains genuinely split, in both directions and among serious people.
Put an episode on in 2026, and the first thing that registers is that it does not look 16 years old. The Atlantic City boardwalk was a full-scale exterior build rather than a digital backdrop, and the show shot it like a film every week. That is the practical reason for those twenty craft Emmys and it is the reason the series has aged the way it has: production design and cinematography do not date the way editing rhythms and dialogue fashions do. A great deal of television made after 2010 already looks like television made in a particular year. This still looks like a film somebody happened to make fifty-six times.
The second thing is the supporting bench, which was extraordinary and was undersold by a show that kept its title character at arm’s length. Jack Huston’s Richard Harrow, a disfigured war veteran and marksman working through a tin mask, is the performance most people who rewatch it come away talking about. Michael Kenneth Williams, playing Chalky White, gave the series its most complete arc outside Nucky himself. Michael Shannon spends five seasons turning a Prohibition agent into something close to a horror figure. Kelly Macdonald, Shea Whigham, Gretchen Mol and Jeffrey Wright are all doing work that would anchor a lesser show.
Two smaller things are worth noticing on a rewatch. The theme is a psych-rock song recorded in 1996, dropped over the opening of a series otherwise obsessive about getting 1920 exactly right, and it has always been the one anachronism the show allowed itself. It works anyway. The other is that a series with a lasting reputation for being slow and cold is, in long stretches, genuinely funny, and the comedy comes from the same place the dread does, which is a room full of people who are all lying to each other and all perfectly aware of it. That was true of its predecessor too.
So the case is not that anybody got it wrong in 2010. The reviews were right, the awards were earned, and the audience that showed up was real. The case is that the show lost a popularity contest it was never built to win, against a run of series that were louder, faster or simply better at becoming a franchise, and that losing that contest has been mistaken ever since for a verdict on quality. Fifty-six hours of it are sitting on a streaming service, and the show they add up to is the one HBO was accused of copying and then quietly outbuilt.
