Dear Gretchen: The Best of Boardwalk Empire

Dear Gretchen,

Which characters on Boardwalk Empire stood out to you the most, and what do you wish viewers could’ve seen if they hadn’t done the seven-year time skip between seasons 4 and 5?

-Tim

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Thanks for your request, Tim!

"It occurred to me the basis of fiction is that people have some sort of connection with each other. But they don't."

Richard Harrow's guttingly bleak dismissal not just of art but of the human connection underlying and motivating it is my personal pick for the greatest line of television dialogue ever written. Jack Huston's entire performance as the deformed WWI veteran and sniper ace is so fucking incredible. He's got that dead, rasping voice and he's so taciturn so much of the time but he's also so vulnerable and scared, and when he lets slip any kind of emotion it's just unbearably tender. Far and away the best hit man I've seen.

Margot Bingham as Daughter Maitland is another fantastic turn. She's so incredibly sad and beautiful and tired, this person who's never really been allowed to be a person because every man who sees her wants to own her. I mean ever her name, Daughter, is a thing that only exists in relation to someone else. It's so hard to watch her just sort of fold in on herself and really die on her feet by giving up. What else could she do? I'd give up in her place. Quicker than she did, probably.

My other favorites of substance are Gyp Rossetti and Gillian Darmody. Gyp because I feel like there's so much insight into what makes stupid men tick packed into that character. He's determined and loud and mean so he's in charge, but he has no idea what he's doing and really no applicable skills at all. And some part of him knows that and relishes the constant humiliation of it, which we see in his sex life, and another part of him bridles at it and drives him to act even stupider and more violently. Also he's played by Bobby Cannavale at peak hotness, which ain't nothin'. 

I love Gillian for similar reasons, really. She's so insecure and so hidden inside herself after a lifetime of being raped and molested and betrayed by the men around her. Whenever she tries to reach out it's so malformed and inappropriate, and her ideas about what families should be are so incredibly sick and destructive, but the neediness and loneliness behind those things are palpably real. She wants to be loved but she doesn't know how it works, or how to express it, or how to feel anything but a need to constantly lie and evade in order to create this kind of perfect illusion that ends up being just another prison for her. That she's the moral and emotional linchpin on which the entire series ends up turning feels appropriate. 

And then there's Gaston Bullock Means, who I don't have anything particularly smart to say about. He's just a pure joy to watch. Stephen Root kills that weird fuckin role.

As for the time skip, what always felt off to me about that is that it omitted any kind of farewell for Michael Stuhlbarg's Arnold Rothstein, who was such a wonderfully cold, prim character. It would've been interesting to see how he handled his deathbed, and of course his famous "You stick to your trade, I'll stick to mine" quip to the police who asked him who'd shot him would have been a real delight to see delivered by Stuhlbarg. The bloody breakup and division of his empire would've made for a cool couple of episodes, too. I think Rothstein's is the only thread I was disappointed to see dropped.