Digital Spy presents Remote Patrol - the weekly column from New York-based TV critic Bruce Fretts, taking a look at what's hot right now in US television.
Fretts is a veteran of both Entertainment Weekly and TV Guide Magazine, where he penned the wildly popular 'Cheers & Jeers' column for ten years.
Boardwalk Empire and Sons of Anarchy: The Gang's All Here!
As two very different gangland dramas - the Prohibition Era mob saga Boardwalk Empire and the modern-day motorbikers epic Sons of Anarchy - head into their final seasons, their ranks have been depleted by a number of shocking deaths: SOA is down Ron Perlman (ex-club leader Clay) and Maggie Siff (leader Jax's old lady Tara), while Boardwalk bid farewell to one-eyed assassin Richard Harrow (Jack Huston).
Such turnover is common in the world of violent cable dramas, as sudden exits up the storytelling stakes and keep budgets down. So both series have added a fresh infusion of cast members for their swan songs. Boardwalk's new faces include a couple of familiar historical figures - untouchable fed Eliot Ness (Jim True-Frost, joining a cadre of The Wire alums including Domenick Lombardozzi and Michael Kenneth Williams) and political patriarch Joseph Kennedy, Sr (Matt Letscher).
The season opener employs a complicated structure, not just in terms of geography (the show is literally all over the map, from Cuba to Atlantic City to NYC to Chicago) but also in terms of time. It simultaneously flashes forward to 1931, as crooked pol Nucky Thompson (the incomparable Steve Buscemi) seeks legitimacy on the eve of Prohibition's repeal, and flashes back to the 1880s, when Nucky, younger brother Eli and their terminally ill sister are being raised by an abusive father (Ian Hart, the brilliant Brit who made his name playing John Lennon twice and has now entered the American-derelict phase of his career with his roles on HBO's Luck and Empire).
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We also see young Nucky as he's taken under the wing of the Commodore (John Ellison Conlee, eerily channelling Dabney Coleman, who embodied the older version of the character) and the Atlantic City sheriff (Boris McGiver - another Wire vet!). Back in the present... er, past... Nucky's in The Godfather Part II mode, traveling down to Cuba to visit his speakeasy sweetie Sally Wheet (Patricia Arquette, on a career roll after Boyhood) and attempt to cut a distribution deal with Bacardi rum.
Boardwalk is the only show on TV that I'll watch more than once. There's so much detail and nuance in every scene that it rewards repeat viewings. Based on the three episodes I've seen of the new season, it's going out strong. And I couldn't be more excited about creator Terence Winter's next HBO project, a drama set in the world of 1970s New York City rock 'n' roll, co-produced with Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger and featuring a stellar ensemble including Boardwalk casualty (and Emmy winner) Bobby Cannavale, Ray Romano, Andrew Dice Clay and more.
Sons of Anarchy's also replenishing its ranks with the addition of Annabeth Gish (doing FX double duty along with her role as a smuggler on The Bridge) as the new sheriff of Charming, Calif, who's not as innocent as she first seems, Malcolm-Jamal Warner (a long way from The Cosby Show's Theo Huxtable as a biker-gang member) and Marilyn Manson, who makes a surprisingly credible white-supremacist inmate in the season opener. He crosses paths with Jax (Charlie Hunnam, still wrestling with his British accent), who's behind bars after cutting a deal with the cops.
Before long, he's sprung, of course, and the bullets and bodies start flying. The level of bloodshed recalls HBO's prison drama Oz, a state of heightened reality where you need to suspend disbelief that so many murders could be committed with impunity. But there's never a dull moment, as Jax blindly seeks revenge against his beloved's killers, unaware it was really his own mom Gemma (Katey Sagal) who did the deed.
Only one man can bridge the divide between these two brutally disparate series: Ivo Nandi, who plays Italian mobster Joe Masseria on Boardwalk and Latino gangbanger Oscar "El Oso" Ramos on SOA (he's also been a Russian cartel chief on Graceland, an Israeli murder suspect on Major Crimes and a Brazilian Alzheimer's patient on House!). Perhaps not surprisingly, one of his characters gets killed off in Boardwalk's or SOA's premiere. I won't spoil it by telling you which, but suffice it to say that Boardwalk's final-season tagline applies to both shows: No-one goes quietly.
