Boardwalk Empire

About the series

Contains story spoilers.

Boardwalk Empire begins in January 1920, when Prohibition gives Atlantic City’s politicians a new business opportunity. County treasurer Enoch “Nucky” Thompson, played by Steve Buscemi, publicly supports temperance while meeting officials and gangsters who intend to profit from illegal liquor. His office, his brother’s position as sheriff and the resort’s clubs help him join political influence to criminal trade. His arrangements extend beyond the boardwalk to powerful visitors from New York and Chicago.

The pilot makes that system personal through Jimmy Darmody, a World War I veteran who wants Nucky to give him consequential work. Nucky’s modest appointment leaves Jimmy feeling underestimated; after a quarrel over a shipment, Jimmy joins Al Capone in hijacking liquor meant for Arnold Rothstein. The robbery goes violently wrong, while federal agents raid Mickey Doyle’s still. Nucky connects Jimmy to both events and faces a choice: punish a useful protégé or accept the money and the harder criminal course Jimmy insists he understands. At the same time, Nucky’s cash meant to help pregnant Margaret Schroeder is gambled away by her abusive husband, whose beating of her leads to her miscarriage and later to his death at Eli’s hands.

Jimmy’s move to Chicago exposes the wider network behind Atlantic City’s liquor trade. In “Anastasia,” Johnny Torrio asks Jimmy and Capone to settle a territorial dispute with Irish boss Charlie Sheridan. Jimmy urges restraint, but Capone threatens Sheridan into an imbalanced agreement. Sheridan’s retaliation reaches the Four Deuces, where his men disfigure Pearl, Jimmy’s lover. The injury turns the territorial argument into a personal grievance, and “Home” shows Jimmy answering it through Richard Harrow, a wounded veteran and former sniper he meets at a medical appointment. Jimmy gets Richard out of the testing room, brings him into the gang’s orbit, and Richard later kills Liam, the man who attacked Pearl. The sequence draws a line from war injuries to the skills the criminal world recruits.

The Atlantic City plots show how Nucky’s carefully managed machine can collide with people he would prefer to keep outside it. In “Nights in Ballygran,” Margaret spots Neary’s men unloading illegal beer into a garage near her home. Nucky brushes off her concern because he does not want to expose her to his violent business, but his silence leaves her to choose between looking away and acting. She tells federal agent Nelson Van Alden that Neary works for Nucky, giving the agents a reason to investigate a local operation they had dismissed as one among too many. Her decision makes her more than a beneficiary of Nucky’s protection: she begins learning how information, favors and appearances can be used as political tools.

Nucky’s enemies also learn to exploit those same channels. The D’Alessio brothers rob one of his bagmen and later target his casino; when Eli identifies them, Nucky has to contain a challenge that is both financial and public. In “Belle Femme,” Margaret helps dressmaker Madame Jeunet negotiate with Nucky over protection payments. A direct appeal irritates him, so Margaret reframes the request around how Jeunet’s departure would reflect on her. She gets the reduction by understanding the personal language Nucky responds to. That episode also leaves Nucky and Margaret caught in a street ambush by the D’Alessios; his butler Eddie stops the gunman, but a bystander is shot. The attack exposes the cost of keeping rivalries just below the level of open war.

The show keeps placing private histories beside political and criminal maneuvering. “Home” turns Nucky’s childhood into part of the present after his elderly, abusive father has an accident at the family home and Eli takes him in. Nucky gives the property to an associate who hopes to settle there, then returns with his father and sets the house alight, handing the startled new owner cash to find another place. The gesture is both an attempt to erase a painful place and another unilateral use of money and power. Elsewhere, Luciano and Meyer Lansky move toward an alliance with the D’Alessios, making clear that Nucky’s local reach depends on a broader arrangement whose members can change sides.

Season one’s final stretch sharpens the tension between official authority and personal violence. In “The Emerald City,” Jimmy is released because investigators lack evidence, while Van Alden’s superiors accept his partner Sebso’s account of a witness’s death and warn him against further embarrassment. The same episode follows Capone trying to prove himself to Torrio by taking responsibility for a mismanaged brewery. In “Paris Green,” Van Alden’s suspicion turns into a murder: after he forces Sebso into a river baptism, he repeatedly pushes him underwater until he drowns. Jimmy, meanwhile, stays beside his seriously ill father, and a doctor’s arsenic test leads him to suspect his mother Gillian poisoned the Commodore. His father begins to recover. Jimmy confronts Gillian with the empty pigment canister he found, assuring her that he supports her whatever she intended. She gives him no explanation, leaving him to carry both the discovery and his decision to stand by her.