The new HBO series Boardwalk Empire looks great and it's entertaining. It is also the vehicle that gives the talented and often underrated Steve Buscemi the role of his career. But it has one flaw. It's the same flaw that's wrong with almost every HBO series. They can swear, so they do. Now I don't object to swearing, but on HBO it almost becomes comical because it is often completely unnecessary and everyone swears in the same tone of voice. This was true of The Sopranos, Deadwood and even comedies like Entourage and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Men, even gangsters, have conversations that aren't sprinkled with f and s and cs and all the other combinations. On these shows it rings false: it is the voices of possibly middle-class scriptwriters who imagine what tough guys talk like or how they would talk if their mothers let them. I have read enough books on crime to know that there were Mafia higher-ups who didn't swear at all; others never in front of their families and especially their wives and children. None of that applies on HBO. It is fortunate that HBO wasn't interested in Mad Men, otherwise it wouldn't be as tightly written as it is because you'd need lots of airtime for unnecessary expletives. So while Boardwalk looks great and the plots are nicely woven, it still lacks any true sense of reality because frankly, there's just too much fucking swearing.
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