In what sounds like the ultimate dream of every snarky person on Twitter, The Wire creator David Simon is making a 1970s porn series for HBO called The Deuce that will star James Franco twice over.
According to Variety, Franco will play a set of twins who “were players in the Times Square world and became fronts for mob control of the volatile and lucrative sex industry.” Enticing.
“We’re interested in what it means when profit is the primary metric for what we call society,” Simon told Variety. “In that sense, this story is intended as neither prurient nor puritan. It’s about a product, and those human beings who created, sold, profited from and suffered with that product.”
That sounds vaguely like The Wire, which looked closely at the interconnected lives of the dealers, addicts, cops, and politicians entangled in the Baltimore drug trade. George Pelecanos, one of Simon’s longtime collaborators who worked with him on The Wire and Treme, will co-write The Deuce as well. But that’s about where the comparisons should end—The Deuce takes place 40 years ago in midtown Manhattan and involves two more James Francos than The Wire had.
Michelle MacLaren, a veteran television director who has worked on Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones, will direct the pilot and produce.
Following a relatively quiet period after the end of Treme in 2013, it’s clear Simon is itching to get back to TV. In addition to The Deuce, HBO also greenlit Simon’s modern-day Washington, D.C. series—”a detailed examination of partisanship and the influence of money on national governance.” This all follows Show Me a Hero, a mini-series about public housing in New York that’s set to premiere August 16 on HBO.
Franco’s been busy, too. Aside from all his movies, the actor will star in Hulu’s most ambitious original series yet—11/22/63, a historical sci-fi thriller based on the book of the same name by Stephen King.