Deucetopia? Mapping spatio-temporalities in HBO’s The Deuce

Abstract

ABSTRACT Set during the burgeoning of theatrically exhibited hardcore pornography and the concomitant transformations of sex work in New York’s Times Square, HBO series The Deuce presents a fictionalized account of these transformations. The attention paid to the series thus far has analyzed it in narrative terms. By instead foregrounding the neighbourhood that provides the series with its title and analyzing The Deuce spatio-temporally – in relation to its historical, narrative and virtual spaces and their respective times – a polysemic text emerges. Rather than merely functioning as a fictionalized period drama, through charting both the transformation of and the characters’ relationship to these spaces over time, the series activates nostalgia to allegorically express ambivalence towards the ‘progress’ embodied in the gentrification endemic to neoliberal, late capitalism in the post-industrial spaces of the early twenty-first century, as well as the anxiety experienced by premium television services in the shifting landscape of televisual programming in our era of cable cord-cutting and industrially disruptive streaming services. In an environment where ‘progress’ and ‘transformation’ have been rendered synonymous with the disruption of industries and institutions, media scholars must historicize recent texts in their present moment, particularly when those texts sound an alarm.