The Deuce concludes Season 1 looking like The Wire’s “shaggy, debauched sibling”

Slate

HBO ’70s porn drama, says Willa Paskin, “provides a panoramic view of all the ways women were exploited at the dawn of the porn age by mobsters, cops, City Hall, pimps, nascent pornographers, sex shops, and themselves. As in The Wire, structural institutions and historical inheritances work with and against each other to create dysfunctional systems so powerful it is nearly impossible to escape them. But there’s a difference between The Wire and The Deuce: Sex can be bought and paid for, but unlike the hard drugs at the center of The Wire it is not only a commodity. Sex can be fun and so can The Deuce, which only lends veracity to the show’s cumulatively damning perspective on the sex trade.”

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