Priced Out

Executive produced/co-executive produced by Richard Price

Six episodes written or co-written by Richard Price: S1E2 “Show and Prove” (with George Pelecanos), S1E3 “The Principle Is All” (with David Simon), S1E5 “What Kind of Bad?” (story by Price, teleplay by Will Ralston and Chris Yakaitis), S1E6 “Why Me?” (story by Price and Marc Henry Johnson, teleplay by Johnson), S2E2 “There’s an Art to This,” S2E5 “All You’ll Be Eating Is Cannibals” (with Carl Capotorto)

One of the most memorable sequences in Richard Price’s 1976 sophomore novel Bloodbrothers (as I noted in my original review) depicts the protagonist’s uncle Chubby going on a drunken late night rampage in Times Square after being insulted by a young panhandler:

Taxis flew by in the street. Yellow blurs. Bruce Lee devastated a cardboard enemy across the way. Chubby lifted the kid with one hand, thumb digging into the soft flesh under the chin… Two hands slapped down on Chubby’s shoulders, yanking him away. Chubby wheeled around, ducked, came up swinging from the ground. A 300-pound fist smacked into open crotch. Chubby backed off, lowered his head and charged, ramming the crippled cop into a woman into a newsstand in a splash of girlie magazines and newspapers… Screeching tires. Screams. The neon bubbled furiously around the marquees. Chubby looked up at the stars. The woman buried under hundreds of Daily Newses screamed for blood. Chubby saw the word “SURCHARGE” in all the headlines. The cop was unconscious. The news dealer stood there in thick glasses and a white apron. Chubby sniffed, buttoned his shirt and pushed through the crowd down into the subway station.

This delirious passage gives a sense of how essential the grimy New York City of the 1960s and ’70s was to the atmosphere of Price’s first four novels. And though he relocated his books to the fictional New Jersey city of Dempsy beginning with 1992’s Clockers, he returned to the Big Apple with his two most recent novels, 2008’s Lush Life and 2015’s The Whites, both of which were primarily concerned with how much the city had changed since its 20th-century bad old days. He was therefore a perfect fit for The Deuce, David Simon and George Pelecanos’s HBO series about the NYC sex trade of the 1970s and ’80s and its implications for the broader transformations of the city. Continue reading →

Executive produced by Richard Price; all episodes written or co-written by Richard Price

I’ll avoid spoilers as much as possible in this review, but given the whodunit elements of the The Night Of‘s story, consider watching the show before reading if you haven’t already.

With Richard Price’s latest project The Outsider premiering on HBO this Sunday, I thought I’d take this occasion to finally put up a post about his 2016 HBO “limited series” The Night Of. I’ve been holding off on this because I expected additional seasons to be forthcoming and wanted to review the series as a whole in one fell swoop, like I did with The Wire. But while The Night Of‘s success with critics and audiences led to revival chatter that lasted over a year after its initial run, there are currently no signs that it’ll return. Of course, one can never say die in the TV landscape that brought us The Conners and a third season of Twin Peaks, so I’ll just cover The Night Of‘s lone existing season here and review additional episodes if and when they come to fruition. Continue reading →