it’s not the story’s bleakness that’s the problem — a show about the desperately impoverished and routinely victimized has every right to be dour. It’s the drab story-telling that rankles here. Every scene lands with a thud, a stepping stone toward the next plot or character beat. You can rattle off descriptions without once needing to dig for layers of meaning: “Paul has dinner with his wealthy lawyer boyfriend, who’s nervous about being outed.” “Darlene shows Abby how to mend a broken shoe, a practical skill the slumming rich girl has never needed to learn.” “The mob beats a construction worker who wasn’t playing ball to keep his coworkers in line.” Quick: Can you think of a single scene in this show that would require more than one sentence to sum up?

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Deuce for Rolling Stone. It suffers from the exact problem the Evil Editor diagnosed in the awful fifth season of The Wire: “If you leave everything in, soon you’ve got nothing.” Basically, it’s juggling so many characters that it has no time to do anything complex with any of them, except maybe Candy, who deserves way more time. The fact that there are two James Francos crammed into this thing says a lot.

Despite the abundant charms of this episode, problems remain. Why is James Franco playing twins? Like, narratively speaking? It’s easy to understand stunt casting like this when it enables writers to depict two distinct personalities using a single actor, insinuating that they’re two competing aspects of human nature. That’s how Kyle MacLachlan’s Dale Cooper/Dougie Jones/Coop-elganger Twin Peaks trinity worked; it animated Ewan McGregor’s performances in Fargo‘s last season as well.

But Vinnie and Frankie are more like two peas in a pod than two sides of the same coin. They look alike, they sound alike, they groom their facial hair alike. They even work at the same place for the same mobster boss. In theory, Vincent’s way more responsible – working man, business owner, yadda yadda. He’s also more likable, able to get along with pimps, prostitutes, cops, mafiosi, straight waitresses, gay customers and even violent vagrants like this episode’s sinister breakout character Big Mike. But is the way he ran out on his wife and kids to make a new life for himself in Manhattan really any less reckless than his brother racking up gambling debts or busting open jukeboxes to steal their cash? On the flipside, is Frankie’s boyish charm really that different from his more straight-and-narrow brother’s people skills?

I reviewed this weekend’s episode of The Deuce for Rolling Stone. In the words of History of the World Part I, “Nice. Nice. Not thrilling…but nice.”