No. 55 Boardwalk Empire Season 5 (2014) 45 of 100
Season 5 of ‘Boardwalk Empire’ was truncated at 8 episodes so I’ll cover the whole thing here. Shannon bows out after 6 of them so it’s pretty much a half season anyway. I get the sense that the producers were told to wrap things up as quickly as possible and there seems an undue haste about the proceedings here. The narrative jumps forward 7 years to 1931, two years before the end of Prohibition. The changes in the booze landscape is reflected in the stories told in this series, most of which have an introspective feel. It’s clearly the end of days for the bootleggers, and for the series too, as the writers scramble to have effective endings for each of their well honed characters. In the 7 years that have passed since season 4 most of the characters have found themselves in altered circumstances. Disappointingly Arnold Rothstein has died in the interim. I appreciate the writers are beholden to real world events and they couldn’t ignore Rothstein’s real life deal during th...