PIA SHANDEL RETURNS FRIDAY NIGHTS ON SHAW

 September 24 at 10:30pm marks the premiere of ‘P!a’, a new format interview and documentary series which will light up Friday nights on Shaw Channel 4. A provocative talk show host, political specialist, journalist, actress and seasoned television veteran, host Pia Shandel will present a personal and passionate side of local celebrities, revealing their true feelings on the issues of the day.
“It bothers me when celebrities are told not to speak out about issues, just stick to the script”, states Shandel. “The most perceptive, articulate and sensitive people I know are artists…and I, for one, want to know their take on the issues that affect us all.”
Stars like Bif Naked, William Davis, Janet Wright, Joy Coghill, Leon Bibb, and Jackson Davies are joined by local Vancouver celebs including Bruce Allen, John Fluevog and Nikki Renshaw in a weekly tapestry of insight and colour on topics as varied as Being Black in Canada, Cruel Shoes, or B.C. Food Trends.
Expect the information to be powerful, the point of view personal and the perspective revealing. For a touch of the absurd, the outrageously funny Patrick Maliha adds his over-the-top comedy to each episode with ‘The Maliha Minute’. All set within a state-of the art virtual environment created by indie producer Go2 Productions Inc. Catch Pia as she brings all her passion and experience to this exciting new television series Friday nights at 10:30pm on SHAW, Channel 4. Be a friend of the show on Facebook and follow Pia on Twitter. For more information visit: www.go2productions.com SELLECK LEADS FAMILY OF BLUE BLOODS Some things are all in the family – and for one New York clan, that includes being a cop.  Emmy winner Tom Selleck anchors a new show by playing a police commissioner in the filmed- on-location CBS drama “Blue Bloods,” premiering Friday, Sept.  24. Frank Reagan has an ex-policechief father (Broadway veteran Len Cariou), a detective son (Donnie Wahlberg), another son (Will Estes) who’s a Harvard-educated police rookie, and an assistant-district-attorney daughter (Bridget Moynahan).  Such careers can only collide, and it takes less than a half hour to get to the first tense dinner-table scene. With the relatives’ various cases, personal conflicts will continue, testing just how thick blood is.  Bobby Cannavale (“Third Watch”) co-stars as Moynahan’s boss, and Andrea Roth (“Rescue Me”) plays Selleck’s love interest.
“The script was terrific,” Selleck says, “and the idea that it was going to shoot in New York, while causing a family consideration (his wife will stay in California but visit often), was too good to pass up. I think, and you could see it in the script, that it’s another character in the show.”
The creators and executive producers of “Blue Bloods” know a lot about making an East Coast series: Robin Green and Mitchell Burgess were writer-producers on HBO’s much-revered “The Sopranos,” and they were brought into “Blue Bloods” by veteran television producer Leonard Goldberg (“Charlie’s Angels”).
“This is a melding of a family drama with a police show,” Burgess says, “and that’s what makes it unique.” And Green recalls, “We said, ‘Why hasn’t anybody done this before?’ Maybe they have, but I can’t remember.” (An example: the mid-1980s ABC drama “Our Family Honor.”)

SKATING ON HOT ICE!

Ron MacLean recalls that he thought it was the dumbest idea he had ever heard.
Now, a year and one ratings hit later, the idea of matching figure skaters and hockey players in a weekly series seems downright brilliant.
For reasons almost no one can define, Canadians fell in love with what essentially is a strange blend of amateur (hockey players in figure
skates) and professional (figure skaters) performance.
It’s not exactly “So You Think You Can Skate,” but it’s not far off.
Yet here we are again, with season two of “Battle of the Blades” about to premiere  Sunday, Sept. 26, on CBUT.
“I thought it would be a disaster,” says MacLean, who is back for a second season of co-hosting the series with figure skater Kurt Browning.
“That was when we sat down for the original proposal: Would you be interested in co-hosting? But when they said it was Kurt, I was good with it. It was basically just my confidence in Kurt.”
For anyone who may have forgotten, “Battle of the Blades” teams one hockey player with one figure skater as a pairs team. Over the course of the series, the teams learn and perform routines until only one pair is left. Last year’s winners were Jamie Sale and Craig Simpson.
MacLean says when he took the job of co-hosting, he did it out of a sense of duty to the network and as a favor to Browning.
“They needed a host who could skate, and it would be ideal if the host didn’t have to use the prompter too much,” he says. “I couldn’t figure skate, but I could skate. And I thought, ‘CBC’s been good to me. I can go down in flames as a favour to them.’ “The thing I didn’t bank on was the women being so impressive that, with or without the men — and I include myself in that — just watching the women skate for a week or two was going to be spellbinding.”
The big surprise, he says, was that over the course of the series, “the men just kept getting stronger and stronger.” This year, Browning says, the hockey players are starting out stronger. “It’s a hard thing to compare them to last year,” he says. “To be fair, the crew that we had last year, they didn’t know what they were getting themselves into. Some of them had heard of figure skating. “With this group, not only have some of them had their figure skates on for weeks, but they also can see the footage from last year. So they’re leaps and bounds ahead of the group that we had last year.”
This year’s group includes such hockey players as Theoren “Theo”
Fleury, Russ Courtnall and Kelly Chase matched up with figure skaters including Shae-Lynn Bourne, Christine Hough-Sweeney and Anabelle Langlois. The pairings are scheduled to be revealed in the first episode. Perhaps the most noticeable difference from the first season will be the venue. Last year, “Battle of the Blades” was set in Toronto’s historic Maple Leaf Gardens. Now the old arena is being renovated, so the show has moved to a soundstage.
“There are some positives and some negatives to that,” Browning says.
“I think Maple Leaf Gardens was a gift, to help us get out of the starting blocks, to have that extra player on the ice — being Maple Leaf Gardens, this extra draw. To see Tie Domi at center ice of Maple Leaf Gardens again, or to be a fan and walk into Maple Leaf Gardens or to see it on the screen, was for me really exciting. “I asked my wife to marry me in that building.”
Shooting on a set did have its advantages, he adds. “We have more control over our environment; it won’t be as cold, there will be bathrooms for everybody. It will be better, but we’ll miss the old girl. Was Maple Leaf Gardens a girl?”
One other change for this season, MacLean says, is the fact that the audience will get more of the story of what goes on behind the scenes as the skaters struggle to get through what is, in fact, a fairly grueling schedule of training and performance. “We all knew the skaters were broken down by the end of the seven weeks,” he says. “But we weren’t sure if we conveyed just how difficult the task was.”

BURNS’ ‘THE 10TH INNING’ HITS IT OUT OF THE PARK

Most topics can be explained in 18.5 hours, but not baseball. It’s so much more than a game with a winner and loser; it’s the hope, philosophy and history of a nation’s spirit played out on a diamond.
Persisting into the bottom of the ninth, with thousands cheering a ball sailing over a fence or an infielder running backward, mitt outstretched to catch a pop-up, infuses baseball with eternal optimism.  “Baseball: A Film by Ken Burns,” the 18.5-hour 1994 documentary, beautifully and exhaustively captured the subject — up to that point in history. So much has happened since then a sequel is warranted.  PBS’  “The Tenth Inning,” airing Tuesday and Wednesday, Sept. 28 and 29 on KCTS, artfully covers the explosive past 16 years in four hours.
“It’s a complicated story,” says Burns, in his Manhattan office with co-director and co-producer Lynn Novick. “And the last two decades were among the most complicated in its history.” We’re not talking minor rule adjustments here, but a season ending strike that canceled a World Series and repelled lifelong fans, greed that made robber barons look like Buddhist monks, and an influx of immigrant players.
The film chronicles how scouting starts with boys who play on dirt lots in the Dominican Republic, using rocks as bases. “Trying to tell that story is revelatory,” Novick says. “The way businesses find talent across the borders these days, it adds layers and layers to the discussion.”
Since the original film, the Red Sox twice won the World Series, and Burns, a lifelong Sox fan, beams. Despite the sentiments of the Red Sox Nation, that alone would not have justified this update.
The seismic change in baseball, on which the film concentrates, is steroid use. Relying on journalists who love and have long covered the game, the film shows them discussing what happens when men become science experiments. Among them is Bob Costas, who says of Barry Bonds breaking Hank Aaron’s alltime home run record, “The whole thing was a joyless march to the inevitable.”
“Barry Bonds is the most interesting, tragic Shakespearean figure in the game,” Burns says.
After 1994, shattered records and 50-home-run seasons became commonplace. Congress questioned players, and the game was cheapened.
The film reminds us that when players started using steroids, there were no rules against them. Howard Bryant, author of books about baseball players and steroids, says, “The fan has decided the game is more important than players.  The game is more important than the owners. The game is more important than money.”
When players returned after the 1994-95 strike, they were shocked when fans booed. Then Cal Ripken Jr., who had slept in his Little League uniform so he could be ready the next day and who signed autographs for hours (free of charge), played his 2,131st consecutive game five months after the strike. His work ethic reminded fans why they love the baseball.  “In the game, we have time for interactions with people around us that make it reflective and interactive,” Burns says. “You always talk about who you saw a game with.”
“Other sports are more like MTV – constant action,” Novick says. “Your brain is stimulated in a way that is a little overwhelming. Baseball rewards your attention.”
In part two, “Bottom of the Tenth,” Pedro Martinez, born into a family of pitchers in the Dominican Republic, doesn’t bother with modesty.
“I’m fearless, intense,” he says. “If you can’t hit a change-up, I’m sorry, I’ll throw it again.”
We see how players are made, including Ichiro Suzuki, whose father put him through three hours of drills a day. Bonds, whose father and godfather (Bobby Bonds and Willie Mays) also knew a bit about baseball, was racking up superhuman stats in 2001.
Then life changed on Sept. 11. Plan to record this because chances are you will stop to talk – or cry – during the section on the terrorist attacks. The first Yankees game after the attacks was in Chicago, where fans held signs that read “We love New York.” What other sport could have brought together the nation as baseball did after 9/11?
Then baseball did what it always does: It broke hearts. The Yankees, making it to their fifth World Series in six years, lost to the Arizona Diamondbacks, a team that had been playing for only four. As the country started to rebuild, baseball records continued to fall, and salaries continued to skyrocket.  In 1975, a free agent earned four times the average American salary.  Now it is up to 50 times. The baseball commissioner imposed drug testing for steroids – but only for minor league players, which made regulations governing the majors the weakest drug prevention policy in professional sports. “Is it possible to have a renaissance and a calamity at the same time?” Bryant asks.
Yes, because this is baseball, reborn each spring with eternal optimism.  And, who personifies hope better than Joe Torre? When he became the Yankees’ manager, the film tells us, no one had ever played in or managed that many games without getting to a World Series.  As Torre says, “This game is too beautiful to have a lasting scar on it.”

SELLECK LEADS FAMILY OF BLUE BLOODS

Some things are all in the family – and for one New York clan, that includes being a cop.  Emmy winner Tom Selleck anchors a new show by playing a police commissioner in the filmed- on-location CBS drama “Blue Bloods,” premiering Friday, Sept.  24. Frank Reagan has an ex-policechief father (Broadway veteran Len Cariou), a detective son (Donnie Wahlberg), another son (Will Estes) who’s a Harvard-educated police rookie, and an assistant-district-attorney daughter (Bridget Moynahan).  Such careers can only collide, and it takes less than a half hour to get to the first tense dinner-table scene. With the relatives’ various cases, personal conflicts will continue, testing just how thick blood is.  Bobby Cannavale (“Third Watch”) co-stars as Moynahan’s boss, and Andrea Roth (“Rescue Me”) plays Selleck’s love interest.
“The script was terrific,” Selleck says, “and the idea that it was going to shoot in New York, while causing a family consideration (his wife will stay in California but visit often), was too good to pass up. I think, and you could see it in the script, that it’s another character in the show.”
The creators and executive producers of “Blue Bloods” know a lot about making an East Coast series: Robin Green and Mitchell Burgess were writer-producers on HBO’s much-revered “The Sopranos,” and they were brought into “Blue Bloods” by veteran television producer Leonard Goldberg (“Charlie’s Angels”).
“This is a melding of a family drama with a police show,” Burgess says, “and that’s what makes it unique.” And Green recalls, “We said, ‘Why hasn’t anybody done this before?’ Maybe they have, but I can’t remember.” (An example: the mid-1980s ABC drama “Our Family Honor.”)

DINNER’S SERVED

The mission Kary Osmond set out for herself was simple but ambitious:
Teach Canada to cook. Now she’s back for another season of turning us into a nation of gourmets, one day at a time, with “Best Recipes Ever,” airing weekdays on CBUT. “People want to understand the whys of cooking,” Osmond says about the show and what it sets out to deliver.
“They want to know what’s happening and why it’s happening when they cook.”
The series, which first hit the air last January, is the product of a partnership between CBC and Canadian Living magazine. The former wanted to beef up its daytime offerings, and the latter had hundreds of its “Tested Till Perfect” recipes filed away and ready to go.
Meanwhile, Osmond is a TV neophyte and a convert to cooking. She was working in marketing, in what she recalls as the proverbial life of quiet desperation, when she decided that she wanted to devote her life to what she really cared about – food.
With her husband’s support, Osmond became a corporate dropout, enrolled in a Toronto community college and studied ethnic cooking.
“My horoscope said, ‘You are about to make a drastic career choice,’ ”
she recalls of the day a friend asked her to help out in a pub kitchen. So she took on the job of spending 16 hours a day “making comfort food from scratch.”
Osmond’s parents ran a Ukrainian deli in Mississauga when she was growing up. So, she says, food is literally in her blood. “From the age of two, I was in a kitchen,” she says. “When I went to university, I thought everyone knew how to cook, but most of my friends were asking me how I did it. So I started teaching them.”
And that’s where she discovered that she enjoyed teaching people how to cook almost as much as she enjoyed cooking. In fact, she was in the process of setting up a learn-to-cook website when the CBC called her in to audition – a process she doesn’t recall fondly. But the network saw something in her frenetic delivery and put her on the air – after teaching her how to speak more slowly. “Best Recipes Ever” may be about teaching us all to cook, Osmond says, but that doesn’t mean it’s too basic for people at home in the kitchen. One episode last season involved preparing a Japanese menu – a cuisine that can be daunting enough to scare away even seasoned cooks “We broke it down for people so anyone could do it,” she says.  Osmond uses a Facebook page to stay in contact with viewers. And, she says, what strikes her most is how people are more knowledgeable than they think they are. “I say, ‘Wow, you guys know how to cook.’ Most people just need to be inspired to cook again.”
The biggest trend Osmond says she’s seeing these days is toward one-pot cooking, which includes the return of the slow cooker, for people stressed for time. “But slow-cooker recipes take it one step further, rather than just throwing it all in the pot,” she says.
“People don’t want to eat as much processed food. They want natural, healthy ingredients prepared well.” Osmond and her husband hardly ever eat out, she says. No matter how tired she is, the lure of the kitchen always wins out, and every night she tries something different.  Then she laughs and sums it up with: “I’m a restaurant.”

MOTOR CITY CENTER STAGE

For someone best known as a gangster and last seen in a series as a cop, Michael Imperioli is a mellow guy. Tibetan prayer beads peek out from under his well-worn shirt, and he talks softly when not in character.  His latest role is Detective Louis Fitch on ABC’s Tuesday drama “Detroit 1-8-7.”
Though Imperioli shot to fame in “The Sopranos” as Christopher, last season he was also a detective on ABC’s remake of “Life on Mars.” “I get offered detectives,” Imperioli says. “I guess they see me as a detective – as long as they see me as something.”
Cast mate James McDaniel has also played a detective; he was Lt.
Arthur Fancy on “NYPD Blue” for seven seasons. On this, he’s Sgt.
Jesse Longford, and after a long career on the homicide squad, he’s preparing to retire in Italy. Longford often talks in Italian, which McDaniel says he’s learning phonetically.  “I’m starting to think like a cop,” McDaniel says. “It really slips in there.”
The title numbers refer to the police code for homicide. This procedural cop show is not only set in Detroit but shot there, and it relies on the cityscape. “I was pushing for this to happen,” McDaniel says of shooting the show in Detroit. “It’s the most incredible backdrop.”
McDaniel, who called Harlem home decades before it was trendy, says, “One of the things I want to do with this show is — imagine I am saying to friends and everyone, ‘I am going to Detroit to do a TV series,’ and everyone says, ‘I’m sorry.’ So we want to show them.”
Though the actors love that this is, as they say, the first national series shot in Detroit, even the Detroit Special Events and Film Office could not confirm that, and the office director says it might well be, but she didn’t have documentation to prove it. Other shows, such as Martin Lawrence’s “Martin” and “Home Improvement,” were set in Detroit but filmed in Los Angeles except for exterior scenes. Some scenes of HBO’s “Hung” are shot near Detroit, but in “Detroit 1-8-7”
the city is very much a character, and the series shoots entirely there.  In the opening scene, the chief of homicide detectives is explaining to a documentary crew how the division works and how detectives log the status of cases in stages on a white board. “We may be the only assembly line left in Detroit,” she says.
In the original pilot, a documentary crew is following the detectives, but ABC was remaking the pilot to lessen that as a plot point. The new episode was not ready as of this writing. Regardless, the feeling that Detroit is important to this series comes through.
In another scene, detectives are looking for bullet casings on the side of a highway and keep finding the wrong shells. They use that gallows humor cops do when dealing with the seamier sides of life.

ONE MAN, TWO LIVES, IN FOX’S ‘LONE STAR’

If you’re going to be a grifter and perpetuate simultaneous long cons in two cities in the same state at the same time, one might think you’d find two names a little more different than Robert Allen and Bob Allen. But as those who saw the premiere last week of the new Monday Fox drama “Lone Star,” that’s exactly the situation of a young, baby-faced con man (James Wolk) with one life and love in Midland, Texas, and another life and wife in Houston (the series films in and around Dallas). “He doesn’t put on a nose and glasses,” Wolk says.
“Does he want to get caught? Are you figuring something out for me?”
In “Lone Star,” Robert lives in the West Texas town of Midland with sweet, naive Lindsay (Eloise Mumford), where he barbecues and sells shares in nonexistent oil and gas wells to friends, neighbors and anyone else he can sweet-talk into signing a check.
Meanwhile, in Houston, Bob is married to Cat (Adrianne Palicki), daughter of self-made oil baron Clint Thatcher (Jon Voight), whose two sons – Drew (Bryce Johnson) and Trammell (Mark Deklin) – have had to deal with Clint’s decision to give his son-in-law a high-powered job in his company.
Complicating Allen’s life in both scams is his father, John (David Keith), a hard-core confidence man who wonders if his boy is going soft.
Allen has already leveraged his influence in the oil company to cover his tracks back in Midland, and now he’s thinking he could possibly get away with keeping both the plates spinning at once. He might even try doing a straight job for his father-in-law. This, though, doesn’t sit well with his father. “John just feels that everybody else out there,” Keith says, “is there for the possible exploitation and financial gain of John himself. He was trained that way by his dad and his grandfather and wants it to continue in his family. He’s a pure sociopath. Other people exist as a mark, as a means to financial gain.
 If they’ve got a soft spot, he’s going to lean on it. He and his son are part of the same team. If his son left the team, then that’s opening himself up to the vulnerability. All’s fair.”
But whether John would actually turn on his son is not certain. “For John, it’s all about his son,” executive producer Amy Lippman says.
“For Clint, it’s all about his family. So it was not simply about the acquisition of power and money.  I think those things are really secondary to both of them. What’s at the heart of (this show) is holding on to people they love. That seems to be not only a soap-opera concept, but actually a pretty universal concept.”
And even though Clint isn’t a criminal, don’t underestimate what he might do if Allen’s secret ever comes out. “He’ll take his head,”
Voight says. “He will protect his clan to the death. He’s dangerous to mess with. He’s a righteous man, and he probably wouldn’t go to the police.  “He’d take care of it himself, but I don’t think he’d use weapons.”

THIS IS REALLY LOSING YOUR HEAD OVER A GAL

 Thomas Culpepper could possibly go down as history’s stupidest villain — so thick that he doesn’t see the danger in seducing the wife of Henry VIII.
However, Torrance Coombs, the Vancouver actor who plays Culpepper, has a slightly more generous view of the man.
He sees him more as a case of ego over intelligence.
“The Tudors” enters its fourth and final season Wednesday, Sept. 22, on CBC Television, and Culpepper is the point of a deadly triangle.
And it’s one we don’t need a history book to tell us can only end in disaster.
“I don’t think he was thinking in those terms,” Coombs says. “He becomes obsessed, and I suppose it starts out as a conquest thing, and he just gets caught up in it, and he can’t really help himself.
“That’s how I like to look at it. Sometimes we do things and we know it’s going to end badly, but you just kind of have to do it anyhow.”
Culpepper (or Culpeper, as it’s often spelled) was a favored courtier of Henry (played again by Jonathan Rhys Meyers), at the time that he married his fifth wife, the child bride Catherine Howard (Tamzin Merchant).
This season of “The Tudors” covers Howard and then Henry’s final wife — more or less a nursemaid — Catherine Parr (Joely Richardson).
Meyers is strangely absent of the signs of advancing age — in Henry’s case, gout, boils and debilitating obesity. However, it’s clear that he’s no sexual match for the playful teen, Catherine Howard.
That’s where Culpepper comes in, seducing the queen into a doomed love affair.
As Coombs plays him, Culpepper is a classic pretty boy, a “beautiful youth,” with piercing blue eyes that conceal a mean streak and a cold heart. He can charm noblewomen and smooth-talk the king one minute and then go off and rape a gamekeeper’s wife the next.
The latter, Coombs says, was a difficult scene to shoot, partly because he was worried that he “wouldn’t make a convincing rapist.”
“I’m not used to being a bad guy,” he says. “I like playing the nice guys. So, when I have to do something like that, I’m really nervous about it. And actually we shot a more explicit version of it that got trimmed down.
“I remember feeling really kind of dirty afterwards, and people in the crew couldn’t look me in the eye. It’s weird. Everyone knows it’s pretend, but at the same time, when you’re dealing with something that dark and heartless, everybody is affected by it a little bit.”
At first, Coombs says, he tried to humanize the character, but as they went along, he and the producers found that the darker he played Culpepper, the better it worked.
Culpepper is a villain of sufficient creepy intensity that Coombs may find himself in demand as a bad guy, which is OK, he says, because, over the course of the shoot, he discovered it was more fun to play evil.
“It’s sort of interesting to go back and watch it, and make myself cringe,” he says with a chuckle. “For some of the scenes, I read them and asked, ‘Do I really have to do this?’ ”
Coombs, 27, was born and raised in Vancouver, where he got his start in a school production of “Cats” at 11, which triggered a love for the stage that he never lost.
After getting his BFA in drama from UBC, Coombs joined the Vancouver Shakespeare mpany, Bard on the Beach, as well as working in contemporary drama and musical comedy.
Before “The Tudors,” his TV work consisted mainly of guest spots on such series as “Battlestar Galactica” and “Heartland” as well as a regular role, as John Doe, on CBC’s adaptation of Douglas Coupland’s “jPod.”
Coombs says he never met or even spoke to anyone from “The Tudors,”
until he reported to the set in Ireland. He was asked to put three scenes on tape and send it to his agent, and a couple of weeks later he was told he had the part.
“I hadn’t met a soul involved with the production, not even the casting director,” he says. “It was just a tape sent off into the ether and then a magical phone call. It was completely surreal, an out-of-body experience. But the entire time I was in Ireland, the feeling never went away: ‘I can’t believe I’m here, doing this right now.’ ”
When he landed the role, he wasn’t aware of just how pivotal Culpepper was. “I was reading the scripts on the way over to Ireland,” he says.
“It was at that point that it dawned on me: I’m kind of in every scene here.
“They were trusting me with a lot, and I was really determined not to arrive there and have them say, ‘Oh, we meant the other Torrance Coombs.’ “Before I left Vancouver, a friend said to me, ‘Just show up and be the guy.’ So that’s what I did.”

‘ICE PILOTS NWT’ RETURNS TO THE FINAL FRONTIER

It’s the classic frontier story..Season One of Omni Film’s Ice Pilots NWT is a gripping 13-episode real-life docu series about a renegade Arctic airline that flies World War II planes in the Canadian North.
Beginning Friday, September 17th at 9pm, the series will air on Global as part of its powerful Fall programming schedule. Filmed over nine months of winter, Ice Pilots NWT follows rookie pilots and frostbitten ramp hands as they struggle to keep vintage warbirds flying despite blizzards, breakdowns and impossible jobs.  Young pilots with a taste for adventure come to Yellowknife-based Buffalo Airways to earn their wings and fly the same vintage aircraft their grandfathers flew in WWII. But it’s a different war now: a war against bitter cold and frequent mishaps, a war to haul people and supplies in the toughest conditions on Earth.

BOARDWALK EMPIRE

In the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y., HBO and executive producers Terence Winter (“The Sopranos”) and Martin Scorsese have brought a 300-foot section of the Atlantic City (N.J.) Boardwalk, circa 1920, back to three-dimensional life, for the history-inspired drama “Boardwalk Empire,” premiering Sunday, Sept. 19.
Although the view beyond the sandy beach is of a wall of stacked shipping containers — and some of the taller bits and further-away bits will be fi lled in with computer-generated animation — from certain angles, the illusion is remarkable and complete.
Based on the non-fiction book “Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times and Corruption of Atlantic City,” by Nelson Johnson, the series stars Steve Buscemi (“The Sopranos,” “Fargo”) as county treasurer Enoch “Nucky” Thompson, a political fixer and backroom dealer who runs the city from his room at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel.
While Nucky has carved out a comfortable niche for himself between politics and organized crime, the arrival of Prohibition and also of a lovely but unhappily married Irish immigrant, Mrs. Margaret Schroeder (Kelly Macdonald), threaten simultaneously to line Nucky’s pockets and put him in peril from the grimly determined Agent Van Alden (Michael Shannon). Also starring are Shea Whigham, Michael Stuhlbarg, Frank Crudele, Vincent Piazza, Stephen Graham, Michael Kenneth Williams, Gretchen Mol, Dabney Coleman and Paz de la Huerta.
On this chilly April night, an election is under way, and there’s a carnival atmosphere on set, aided by a stilt walker in striped pants and the Wild Man of Borneo. Extras, many in vintage clothing from the period, stroll the planks or, as with a group of seersucker-suited young swells in straw boaters, are pushed along in wheeled wicker carts.
With the luxurious lobby of the Ritz-Carlton, the swanky dress shop and the sweetshop selling saltwater taffy, it could be any seaside resort — except for one attraction.  Created when the inventor of incubators could not convince doctors to buy his creation, the glass-walled “Incubator Baby” room boasts “Babies Under 3 Lbs.,” cared for by nurses in the full view of the public. Such an exhibition would be unthinkable today — except perhaps in a reality-TV show.
While other historic locations in New York also appear, it’s the boardwalk itself that’s the heart of the show — and it’s helpful to the actors as well.
“Sometimes when we’re shooting in the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton,” says Buscemi, “which is huge, I go, ‘All right, this was all built.’ It’s incredible.”
“The boardwalk was hugely helpful for me,” says the Scottish Macdonald, “because I had no reference. I think about Atlantic City, and I think about Boardwalk and Park Place (in the Monopoly game).
Atlantic City conjured up no images.”
While he played a tough gangster in “The Sopranos,” Buscemi is actually rather gentlemanly as Thompson, who would rather deal than fight. “I can’t help but like him,” Buscemi says. “He’s a fascinating guy.  He’s complicated. I think he does have a good heart. He genuinely wants to build this city. He wants to give the people what they want, and I think his attitude was, ‘If they don’t want me to do it anymore, I won’t be elected.’
“Nucky’s a realist,” says Winter, “and knows this is what it takes to run a city. Sometimes palms need to be greased. It’s not always going to be easy or the right thing, people are going to get hurt and paid off, but that’s what it takes. “Hopefully, politicians, at the end of the day, do more good than bad.”

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