The Deuce

James Franco is back playing Vinnie and Frankie Martino in "The Deuce," which is about to go into its third and final season on HBO. The twin Bronx brothers are still running bars, clubs, and massage parlors for the mob. Maggie Gyllenhaal co-stars in the series as Eileen "Candy" Merrell, a prostitute turned top director.

They lead a great cast of a dozen more characters, sex workers, streetwalkers, pimps, drug dealers and crime bosses. But perhaps the most compelling thing about this series is the saga of Times Square being transformed from a crime-ridden, red-light district of the '70s and '80s into to the sanitized corporate Broadway fantasia it has become.

How easily the show could have devolved into a campy carnival of mobsters, dirty cops, hookers, hustlers and pimps. But instead, "The Deuce" escapes the usual bout of cable series-itis. It is still a solidly character-driven drama, not resorting, as so often happens, to desperate cartoonish plot devices.

Several episodes have been directed by Franco, and he's on much more solid ground than he was with his flimsy "Interior, Leather Bar," in which he obsessed over lost s/m film footage shot at the Anvil of from the 1979 gay slasher flick "Cruising."

Franco gives two of his best performances as the gregariously suave twins always about to drown in hot water, professional or personal. Franco also directs some of the episodes. The team of directors for all three seasons are all on the same aesthetic page-the scripts are tight, and episodes flow with fine acting and earned pathos and humor.

Season 3 picks up in the mid-80s, and now in mid-town Manhattan, the sex trade may be out of plain sight, but still booming and the right palms continued to be greased in more profitable ways. Candy is a top porn director on both coasts and refusing to film the same old male pervy perspective. Even though she meets resistance from her business partner, who refuses to risk money on what he considers 'feminist' and 'artistic' material, Candy doesn't back down and changes the industry.

Another ongoing theme in the series is an expose of the seamy side of the porn industry - most shocking, of course, the industry's disregard for safe-sex practices in straight and gay porn at the height of the AIDS epidemic.

And of course New York's gay community was the hardest hit by HIV-AIDS epidemic by the mid-80s, and everything has changed from the disco sex-and-drug bender days. Paul is now running a gay bathhouse but is also an AIDS activist and, as much as he can, taking care of his lover, an actor who just finished a run Martin Sherman's "Bent" about gays in Nazi concentration camps. He is forced to make career changes as he is secretly battling AIDS.

Kudos to Maggie Gyllenhaal for portraying Candy; she is equally captivating whether fighting for dignity for sex workers or taking care of her mother in the suburbs or searching for troubled son Adam.

Among the other standout performances include Margarita Levieva as Abby, the Columbia student who chooses to work behind Vinnie's bar. By season 3 they are still a hot and heavy couple, but problems emerge when Vinnie starts seeing his ex-wife.

Abby meanwhile has become part of the feminist movement fighting, among other things, the porn industry's exploitation of women. Lawrence Gilliard, Jr. is also excellent as black NYPD officer Chris Alston, the cop who knows every score and scam on the streets, in the precincts and city hall. Emile Meade is star Lori Madison, just out of rehab and back in L.A., starring in her come back porn film.

"The Deuce" also can boast impeccable art direction and for gay audiences, the show re-creates the intoxicating atmospherics of post-Stonewall gay bars from the era. Chris Coy gives a gorgeous performance as Paul, the gay bartender in season 1 who goes to The Loft, one of the post-Stonewall bars that was the embodiment of the new liberation. By the '80s he and his new boyfriend are high on the dance floor at the legendary Paradise Garage. Both scenes are without a doubt some of the best gay club dancing scenes ever filmed.