'Boardwalk Empire' creator spills secrets behind series finale
(Warning: contains spoilers about Sunday night's series finale of 'Boardwalk Empire')
Terence Winter, who created 'Boardwalk Empire,' says yes, Nucky Thompson paid for his sins as 'Boardwalk' finished its five-year run Sunday night.
Actually, Nucky (Steve Buscemi) paid for one specific sin. That was enough to leave him crumpled up and dead on the boardwalk he once ruled.
Fittingly, though, Nucky's death didn't signal a wide sweep by the nets of justice, in which the bad fish were caught and the good fish swam free.
'In life, it's not that simple,' says Winter. 'Sometimes bad people get away with things and good people suffer. Sometimes crime pays. Sometimes the world is unfair.'
That truth won't come as any big revelation to people who have watched HBO's 'Boardwalk' from the beginning,
It's also not the show's most unsettling message, Winter suggests.
More unsettling, he says, 'You see a little of yourself reflected' in all the horrible things the 'Boardwalk' characters have done.
'That's why gangsters are fascinating people,' he says. 'Most of us wouldn't go as far as they do, but who knows? If I were in Atlantic City in the 1920s, I don't know that I wouldn't have done some bootlegging. Everyone else was.
'Watching gangsters in the movies or on television is like riding a roller coaster. You get a sense of what it might feel like to die without actually dying.'
Winter says the 'Boardwalk' story finished just about where he originally envisioned, though some of the specific plotlines and characters expanded or contracted as the show went along.
He cites Richard Harrow (Jack Huston) as a character whose original three-episode arc grew into a spot as a regular before he died at the end of season 4.
'As you're writing, you put two characters together and suddenly there's an electricity. You know there's something there, and on HBO you have the freedom to run with it.'
The key series-long threads that eventually led to Nucky's death also were partly shaped along the way, Winter says.
Viewers didn't learn until the last minutes of the last episode that as a young sheriff's deputy in 1897, Nucky had handed a 12-year-old runaway orphan named Gillian Darmody over to The Commodore (Dabney Coleman) - knowing exactly what the Commodore, a pedophile, would do to her.
The Commodore ruled Atlantic City at that time and by 'recruiting' this girl for him, Nucky won his favor. The Commodore made Nucky sheriff and eventually his successor in the machine that ran the city.
Gillian, who had trusted Nucky when she was desperate and alone, bore an illegitimate son the following year. Jimmy Darmody was a brilliant boy who suffered serious psychological scarring in World War I.
He married and had a child, but turned to the criminal life under the tutelage of Nucky, who had helped raise him. They had a falling-out and Jimmy turned against Nucky. At the end of the second season, Nucky shot and killed him.
Meanwhile, Gillian (Gretchen Mol) led a tortured life, becoming a prostitute, a hustler, an addict, a frustrated grandparent and finally a killer, for which she was put in a mental hospital for life.
Soon after Nucky saw Gillian one final time in the hospital, he was gunned down by Tommy Darmody, Jimmy's teenage son.
'In the end, that decision about Gillian sealed Nucky's fate,' says Winter. 'But I didn't fully realize the importance of Gillian until Season 2. I didn't realize she'd be the critical turning point in his life, where the decision he made in that one moment destroyed three generation of her family and ultimately his own life as well.'
As you're writing, you put two characters together and suddenly there's an electricity.
Fate was no kinder to Valentin Narcisse (Jeffrey Wright), who won control of the vice world in Harlem until Lucky Luciano and his emerging crime syndicate decided there was no place for independents.
Narcisse was cut down outside his church.
Al Capone (Stephen Graham) was headed for jail, but with a curious twist. The night before his trial began, he sat down with his deaf son and said, 'I did some bad things and I'm in trouble....I'm going away.'
He told his wife to take care of the boy.
'One of the luxuries of a long-running show is you get to dig deeply into the characters,' Winter says. 'Capone is always portrayed as this big blustering killer, which of course he was, but he also had a home and a family.
'Showing those last scenes with his wife and son before he would go to prison, that made him much more interesting.'
The endings were happier for Luciano (Vincent Piazza), who had apparently succeeded in putting together the first 'five families' crime syndicate, and for Nucky's long-estranged wife Margaret (Kelly Macdonald).
'Margaret is financially successful,' says Winter. 'She's in the best place we've seen her in 11 years.
'Of course, she does have a lot of accumulated baggage. I see years of therapy ahead for her, if they had that then.'
Eli (Shea Wigham), the brother who followed Nucky down a lot of bad roads, also had a glimmer of hope despite living like a man who wanted to die.
In their last meeting, Nucky gave him a sack of money, a razor and a shaving brush. Nucky told Eli to ask his wife to take him back.
'I think Eli will do that,' says Winter. 'Of course, you don't know for sure.
'I didn't want to make everything too specific. You want people to wonder a little, give them something to talk about.'
Overall, says Winter, he feels like the final eight-episode season was exactly what the creative team needed to wrap up the show.
'We talked it over with HBO,' he says, 'and the number everyone came back with was eight.
'That gave us time to wrap up the stories and even introduce a couple of new characters. We didn't feel like we had to rush anything. We could keep the rhythm we'd had all along.'
One thing that wasn't quite so hard toward the end was the delicate matter of telling primary actors their character was about to get killed off.
'It's never something you like to do,' says Winter. 'You work with people, you get to like them, and then you have to tell them they're out of a job.
'But you have to be true to the story. I had people tell me they couldn't believe we killed Jimmy Darmody. To me, as a viewer, Nucky had to kill him. If Nucky hadn't, I would have been saying, no, wait, I don't believe that.
'Keeping Jimmy alive at that point, to me, is what a TV series would have done. We wanted this show to be more true to life.'
In one odd scene Sunday night, Nucky's last stroll along the boardwalk was interrupted by a shapely blond who tells him to come look at the future.
'Are you in it?' he asks.
'I'm there, but I'm not there,' she replies.
He steps into a darkened tent and gets a look at an electronic screen with flickering, ill-focused black-and-white images of a person singing 'Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.'
Meet television, patient zero.
'I loved that we could get that in,' says Winter. 'It's a great moment. He's seeing the future and he's not in it.'
There were more stories that could have been folded into 'Boardwalk,' says Winter, but he's happy they weren't.
'I'm from the school of leaving the stage while the audience still wants more,' he says. 'We've done 56 hours and we didn't want to get in a position where we started repeating ourselves. We had a great five-year run and now it's on to what's next.'
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