Trading Places

Boardwalk Empire (2010) is an HBO crime drama you can watch online on iFILM. Created by Terence Winter and launched with a pilot directed by Martin Scorsese, the series ran five seasons across 56 episodes — the story of what happened when the US banned alcohol and turned small-time crooks into empires.

Atlantic City, the first dry night in September 1920. City treasurer Enoch "Nucky" Thompson (Steve Buscemi) has always run both the ballot box and the back alley. He greets Prohibition not as a threat but as a business model: whatever used to sell at the bar now sells for five times the price from a basement. Around him orbit a brash young Al Capone (Stephen Graham), a calculating Lucky Luciano (Vincent Piazza), and federal agent Van Alden (Michael Shannon), who chases bootleggers with the zeal of a man personally wronged by a liquor bottle. Margaret Schroeder (Kelly Macdonald) falls into Nucky's world and quickly learns there is no clean exit.

The show draws on Nelson Johnson's non-fiction account of real-life Atlantic City boss Enoch Johnson. Scorsese's direction of the opener set a tone — gangster epic cut with grim irony — that the series carried all the way through season five. Stream every episode of Boardwalk Empire (2010) online on iFILM.