No Middle Ground: Boardwalk Empire and Game of Thrones

In the latest in our series on television parallels to Game of Thrones, freelance critic Jeremy Mongeau compares it to HBO’s other huge investment from the 2010-2011 television series: Boardwalk Empire.

We’re some time away from seeing how Game of Thrones chooses to end its story, but that doesn’t stop us from speculating about who will live and die, trying to figure out who’s going to end up on the Iron Throne. This weekend, Boardwalk Empire wrapped up its own saga of power struggles and high-stakes war, and did so in style. We’ve seen who survives, who dies, and who thrives. So many fates on Thrones are up in the air, but on Boardwalk, they’ve all made their hard landings.

The two shows have been linked from the start. Both were developed during HBO’s wilderness years late last decade, after The Sopranos and The Wire had finished their runs. A new wave of dramas like John from Cincinnati and Tell Me You Love Me failed to catch on, and HBO’s biggest rivals, like AMC were nipping at their heels. HBO didn’t just want a hit, it wanted a phenomenon: a show that could bring in viewers, critical praise, and tons and tons of awards. No wonder HBO was drawn to Boardwalk and Thrones: both shows were about fending off rivals and holding onto hard-earned territory.

Thrones, of course, was based off irresistible source material. Boardwalk was adapted from a book as well, but the real draw came from the talent involved. The showrunner was Sopranos vet Terence Winter, and the director of the pilot was cinematic icon Martin Scorsese. Both shows came with big pedigrees and even bigger budgets (Boardwalk‘s pilot cost an unheard of $18 million). They were designed to be event television; the type of shows you couldn’t miss. And in the end, both found ways to deliver on that promise.

The two shows are both obsessed with the same themes:

Power, how it’s gained and how it’s wielded. Ambition, its pitfalls and its allure. Loyalty, how hard it is to come by, and how hard it is to live with. These are shows about families vying for power—in Westeros, they’re feudal houses, and in Atlantic City and New York, they’re crime families.

Boardwalk follows Nucky Thompson (Steve Buscemi), the Treasurer of Atlantic City; part-politician and part-crime boss. He’s a bit like Littlefinger that way, only without the bitter grudges and the kink for chaos. Nucky just wants to make money from bootlegging and keep his political machine running smoothly. It’s never that simple, of course; he finds himself drawn into territory disputes and mob wars no matter how much he tries to keep the peace.

Game of Thrones opens with a minor event that has far-reaching consequences: the attempted murder of Bran Stark, and its complexity expands rapidly from there. Boardwalk has a similar instigating moment in its pilot. Nucky strikes a deal to serve as a liquor supplier for mob bosses in New York and Chicago in Prohibition-era America, but his plans evaporate early on when his protege Jimmy Darmody (Michael Pitt) teams up with a low-level Chicago flunky by the name of Al Capone (Steven Graham) to hijack a shipment.

From there on, Boardwalk—like Thrones—takes on a much larger scope. It introduces a sprawling ensemble of players, from fictional creations like Nucky and Jimmy to real life gangland legends like Capone, Lucky Luciano (Vincent Piazza), and Meyer Lansky (Anatol Yusef). Both shows spread their cast across a large playing field. Boardwalk travels from Atlantic City and New York, to Chicago and Washington, all the way down to Miami and Havana. Characters move across the map, each fighting to hold onto their real estate, and their lives.

Nucky remains Boardwalk‘s central figure, in a notable difference from Game of Thrones’ early removal of its protagonist and biggest star. Thompson and Thrones‘ original hero Ned Stark don’t have a lot in common, especially when it comes to their disposition: Nucky’s clever and shrewd, knowing how to get what he wants out of people, compared to Ned’s blunt honesty. But fate finds both Nucky and Ned end up facing the same dilemma: just how far are they willing to go to survive? Jimmy tells his boss, “You can’t be half a gangster.” He means the same thing as Cersei Lannister does when she warns Ned that “you either win or you die, there is no middle ground.”

If you want to keep your head, whether it’s in Westeros or the world of organized crime, you have to fully commit. You have to have the stomach for it. When Ned has to cross that line, he tries to do the right thing, and suffers for it. When Nucky’s faced with that same dilemma, he’s willing to get his hands dirty. That decision has consequences, but Nucky Thompson he lives to fight another day.

The two shows don’t just share a fascination with the same themes; they also tell their stories in a similar style. Of course, both shows being products of HBO, that means there’s a healthy dose of sex and violence on both. Boardwalk can go blood splatter-for-blood splatter with Thrones, even if pistols leave a different mark than swords. The shows also share a frank and graphic take on sexuality, with similar portions of the mandatory premium cable nudity.

Both series love to use long, luxuriously-paced scenes as building blocks for their stories. Conversations are rich with intrigue and hidden motives. And both shows rely on their trademark monologues that reveal character and history. like the unforgettable speeches like the one delivered to a captured Klansman by black bootlegger Chalky White (Michael K. Williams, best known as Omar from The Wire), relating the story of his father’s murder at the hands of a lynch mob.

Boardwalk’s thick with memorable characters like Chalky. But the show’s breakout player is Richard Harrow (Jack Huston). He’s a soldier haunted by his past, his emotional scars reflected by his shocking facial wounds. He’s Boardwalk’s answer to Sandor Clegane. And where The Hound covers up his hurt with bitter humour and cynicism, Harrow covers up his facial wounds with a flimsy plastic mask. Harrow provides some of the shows most heartbreaking moments, as well as some of its most viscerally thrilling, such as a brothel shootout with a rival gang.

From there, there’s characters like Agent Nelson van Alden (Michael Shannon), a dour zealot obsessed with carrying out the law—and a man who’d have a thing or two to talk about with Stannis Baratheon. There’s power broker Arnold Rothstein (Michael Stuhlbarg), who, like Varys, uses a mannered affect to hide the steel beneath. Capone’s a wild and unstable leader, every bit as dangerous a boss to have as Joffrey Baratheon. The final season introduced another historical figure in Joseph Kennedy (Matt Letscher), a businessman and a patriarch who would go onto build a political dynasty that would put Tywin Lannister’s to shame.

But the most powerful character parallel between the two shows might be Jimmy Darmody, he of the “half a gangster” advice. He’s Boardwalk’s answer to Theon Greyjoy. Brash young men torn between surrogate families and blood relations, between loyalty and ambition. Both end up making the wrong decision, and have to face up to the consequences. Jimmy’s mother Gillian (Gretchen Mol) is a Cersei-esque figure, tired of being used by the men in her life, who decides to channel her energy into pushing her son towards power.

Time and time again, characters on both shows face the same plights, and usually make the same mistakes. Chaos is a ladder, after all, and most will go tumbling down it. To participate in these worlds is to gamble with your life.

And as Boardwalk came to a close this year, we saw the real winners and losers of the game emerge. True to history, Luciano and Lansky end up on top at the end of a decade of gang wars. They’re pawns and lackeys in the first season, and kingpins by the series finale. It’s the type of satisfying long-form storytelling that we’re still in the middle of on Game of Thrones, watching characters like Jon Snow and Sansa Stark move ever upwards.

Elsewhere on Boardwalk‘s final season, karma came calling for the characters who weren’t as lucky as Luciano. Many of Boardwalk‘s fictional character faced personal reckonings, a final accounting of their sins over the series. Flashbacks showed us how Nucky first gained power, and the heavy moral compromises he had to make along the way. The decisions characters made to survive and advance in the world were visited upon them in satisfying, resonant ways.

Boardwalk Empire and Game of Thrones stand as two of television’s all-time great rise-and-fall epics. There’s something powerful about the harsh ultimatums of these worlds: sin or suffer, backstab or be backstabbed, live or die. You can’t be half a gangster, any more than you can be half a Stark or a Lannister.

Jeremy Mongeau is an unemployed Canadian with a lot of thoughts on television. You can find him on Twitter at @JeremyMonjo.

• Published on 10/28/2014 at 8:30 AM CDT
• Last updated on 10/28/2014 at 8:30 AM CDT