That '70s Show

The Deuce revisits an era of sex and crime that we’re too quick to glamorize.

- Matt Zoller Seitz

NOSTALGIA FOR AMERICA in the 1970s kicked off in earnest 20 years ago with Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights and has continued unabated ever since. Those who actually lived through the decade might raise an eyebrow at the various films and television series that celebrate what Tom Wolfe in this magazine famously dubbed the Me Decade: that awkward bridge between the chaotic, utopian ’60s and the unapologetic materialism of the ’80s. It’s often the perception of lawlessness, sleaze, and machismo that drives storytellers back to the era of wide-lapel shirts, platform heels, medallions, and cocaine. The appeal lies not in what was actually happening and whom it was happening to, but in a collective sense that the ’70s was the last era in which men could be macho, women and people of color “knew their place,” casual sex wasn’t freighted with fear of terminal illness, and you could say anything that popped into your head without fear of censure. HBO traveled down this pop-culture road just recently with Vinyl, a one-season disaster set against the backdrop of the record industry in New York City. That show flopped, despite its sumptuous production values and superb performances, because it was less an examination of alpha-male narcissism than a celebration of it—Mad Men with louder music and without the layered, intricate sense of history and psychology.