Entertainment

Booze blues

TOUGH GUYS: Steve Buscemi (left) and his band of thugs are back for Season 3 of HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire” Sunday night. (
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Nucky is back with his new and old tricks — pun intended — as he goes about ruling Atlantic City with an iron fist and a pin-striped suit circa 1922.

The new season of “Boardwalk Empire” opens Sunday night with a bit of gratuitous violence via new threat Gyp Rosetti (Bobby Cannavale), a powerful New York gangster who wants to take over the bootlegging biz.

Mostly he’s an idiotic thug, and you really have to be an even bigger idiot to imagine this all-violence/no-brain brute could figure out how to put his socks on, let alone figure out how to take on the most powerful boss on the East Coast.

And even though Gyp tells his first victim (a good Samaritan who does him a favor!) that he’s from Seesalee, Rosetti sounds more like someone who fell out of “The Sopranos” and landed in 1922 by mistake.

The second scene of the season premiere has Nucky and the gang threatening to kill someone in a warehouse (of course) while drinking take-out coffee in paper cups with lids, even though paper lids weren’t invented until well into the next decade. Talk about a man ahead of his time!

Anyway, Nucky (Steve Buscemi) is now married to Margaret (Kelly Macdonald), who somehow transformed in a very short time from an uneducated, albeit socially conscious Irish immigrant/abused wife living in abject poverty, to a brilliant, socially conscious, socialite and hostess.

Last season, Nucky married her in order to avoid having her testify against him, but Margaret’s so smart (and chic) that she out-maneuvered Nucky and had one of his big deals donated to the church.

As in every other season, almost every sentence uttered by everyone is some sort of veiled threat, except when it comes to Gyp, who doesn’t bother with the veil, preferring instead to reveal all by saying things like, “I’ll s – – t you out like yesterday’s sausage!” What? Or to Al Capone, (Stephen Graham), who has a deaf son: “Say hello to your boy for me . . . or at least wave!” Oy.

Nothing puts a capper on gratuitous violence (always after the victim thinks they’ve been spared), like gratuitous nudity, and you haven’t lived ’til you’ve seen Nucky’s new mistress/Al Jolson’s singing partner, Billie Kent (Meg Chambers Steedle) fixing a broken radiator in the nude. Braver than all the gangsters, she’s not afraid of possible escaping steam!

Strangely enough, the only scenes that aren’t so dark that you need night-vision goggles to watch, are the ones with the naked ladies. Then, suddenly the lights are finally working properly.

Still, there’s something compelling about it all — maybe it’s the era, or the clothes, or the hint that this could be something terrific. I meant to watch one episode but watched four. That tells you — or maybe me — something is worth watching.