Nucky Johnson is the original sinner in HBO series Boardwalk Empire

BOARDWALK Empire is an epic tale of crime as the American way of life.

Boardwalk Empire

SOME call it dryly TV's "best-curated and bloodiest antiques shop". But, finally, beginning its fourth season this week, Boardwalk Empire is taking a distinguished place in the 21st century's most discussed form of art television: the literary, 12-episode, premium cable serial.

If you've never seen it, it's based on the true story of Nucky Johnson (played as Nucky Thompson by the pallidly complected Steve Buscemi), the corrupt politician who used Prohibition to turn Atlantic City into his own illicit empire between 1911 and 1941.

Created by cable network HBO, which also gave us The Sopranos, The Wire and The Pacific, Boardwalk Empire was instantly a critical hit and, as it has developed through three seasons, has slowly gained a popular following.

It took a while. It's simply so dense, so teeming with incident, rich in detail and sprawling with character, so implicitly absorbed with itself, that it has been easy for casual viewers to get a bit lost if the show briefly took their fancy. The many characters, plots and foreshadowed subplots are so fleetingly introduced that the series has always required a concentrated form of viewing.

It's the brainchild of Terence Winter, the writer behind The Sopranos, and consummate storyteller and visual stylist Martin Scorsese, who has embraced TV's digital world without losing any of his traditional filmmaking fluency or classic skills. Scorsese, who remains an active and enthusiastic executive producer (he also directed the first, style-setting episode), has described the series as "an epic spectacle of American history, or culture, I should say, American culture".

He meant gangsters, of course, the authentic mafia, those sometimes monstrous outsiders, and their attempts to gain acceptance in respectable society. And the way the pervasive and compelling theme of organised crime can be read as an allegory of the runaway American quest for wealth and power.

Across 36 episodes so far, Scorsese and Winter have given us an inspired anthropology of the mean streets and a kind of ethnography of those Knights of the Crooked Table who so pitilessly took over American cities to enjoy the fruits of crime.

It's a complex - highly sensuous in its treatment - exploration of the way these tribal barbarians, many of them immigrants, used their skills in violence to achieve a level of equality with those of established wealth and power. Boardwalk Empire is the story really of crime as an American way of life, full of ample delights and striking just the right strangeness of tone. It poses one great question: how much sin can any of us live with?

Scorsese's was the most expensive pilot shot in US TV history and the show remains sumptuous and cinematic, simply Scorseseian. It sucks you right into the end of the Roaring 20s, resurrecting an era of corrupt politicos, bootleggers, big bands, roaring tommy guns, high-kicking showgirls and capricious criminal masterminds. It's dazzling to look at and has operatic style, grand complicated characters and all those confrontingly violent moments straight from the Scorsese gangland manual.

It has taken a while to develop more than a cult following, its box sets only now becoming the reason for binge-watching weekends after new fans have discovered it. There's still an aura surrounding Boardwalk as the best show on TV that no one really loves.

With Scorsese and Winter involved, it was expected the series would quickly develop the obsessive devotion that still surrounds The Sopranos. It's easy to forget The Sopranos was a slow burner and, locally, it was quickly relocated to the witness protection timeslot late at night on Nine, annoying the hell out of the show's Australian aficionados. And not everyone was a fan in the US, either. For many Americans, the mob series had overstayed its welcome well before the famous finale went to air.

It had become too dreamy, critics said, too confusing, too literary. Just as Francis Ford Coppola should have left The Godfather alone after part two, perhaps creator David Chase should have let his once inspired show take a bullet years earlier and let The Sopranos quietly sleep with the fishes.

To be honest, I only dipped in and out of Boardwalk myself, intermittently beguiled, but I'm now determined to watch it to the, well, death. Now, at the beginning of episode 37, it's February 1924, almost a year after the explosive events of season three's final episode, directed by Sopranos veteran Timothy Van Patten.

Nucky has survived the gang war that swept the series, and has persevered through duplicitous deals and double deals, murderous bluffs and counter bluffs, taking out New York gangster Joe Masseria's men during the final episode in a roadside massacre.

The enigmatic Richard Harrow (Jack Huston), the man with half a face, the rest covered with a kind of plastic mask, armed with his sniper rifle and an arsenal of back-up weapons, gunned down nearly all of Giuseppe "Gyp" Rosetti's men in the Artemis Club. And Rosetti, brilliantly played by Bobby Cannavale and largely the focus of the previous season, was knifed to death by one of his own men.

The tagline going into the third season was "You can't be half a gangster". Nucky's now become the full deal and crossed the line after surviving Rosetti's attempt to overthrow his empire. As the fourth season starts, he's alone, a new person, laying low at the end of the Boardwalk in the grandest hotel. He's more calculating, no more glad-handing, and obviously shrewder, thinking ahead, maybe of Florida; his marriage to Margaret (Kelly Macdonald) appears to be done for good.

But new challenges engulf him in the first episode. A domestic battle is looming with his brother Eli (Shea Whigham), rivalry and resentment lurking beneath the smiling facade of their comradeship. Harrow is mysteriously murdering furtive gun-carrying businessmen (a superb dramatic opening set-piece too). And Nucky financially keeps the peace with the equally unreadable Masseria (Ivo Nandi) while working the odds with fellow gangster Arnold Rothstein (Michael Stuhlbarg). Mob-crime drama story-lines are now front and centre and we seem to be entering a reimagining of the Warner Bros gangster movie era.

Boardwalk Empire really is a superb piece of craftsmanship, proving the gangster genre is one of great longevity and power, within which - and no one appreciates this more than Scorsese - both the history of cinema and a history of American culture's psyche can be found.

Given the abnormal sexual relationships that abound in Boardwalk, the quasi-erotic content in conjunction with its violence has a not unpleasurable kinky pull, too. Winter gets right the traditional generic disparity between the dire, murderous realities of crime and a high degree of visual wit and design; and the right tonal flippancies of dialogue and performance produce a beguiling, scraggly vein of black humour.

As the fourth season begins this week, you are again left uncomfortably uncertain of what you feel or with whom you sympathise, as you often are in these long-arc, novel-like dramas. In this dark Dostoevskian world - he described it as characterised by "the feeling of separation and isolation from mankind, nature, and the law of truth" - guilt and innocence are problematic, the permutations almost endless.

The great Belgian crime writer Georges Simenon said of Dostoevsky: "What he contributed above all, in my opinion, is a new notion of the idea of guilt. Guilt is no longer the simple, clearly defined matter one finds in the penal code, but becomes a personal drama that takes place in the individual's soul."

And Buscemi's superbly characterised Nucky, introspective, brooding, his long face still except for the blood vessels moving under his eyes, remains tantalisingly inscrutable, a puzzle still unsolved. He is someone about whom we have a great deal of information yet who remains an enigmatic figure. This series is suddenly edgy, jived-up and very hip.

THE long-running comedy The Office closes for the final time this week and a piece of TV history comes to its proper elegiac conclusion. There's still plenty of hilarity, a touch of surrealism, the always welcome political inappropriateness - there's also one outright shock in the finale too - lots of kindness and a strange sadness as these characters with whom we've lived for so long fade away.

The Office began awkwardly as the American interpretation of Ricky Gervais's acidic British mockumentary of the same name. The original show was, among other things, an upsetting critique of reality TV. Gervais's characters both savagely and sadly embodied the way it exists to pander to our need for fame.

The American version as it played out under producer Greg Daniels's astute guidance wasn't as brutal, or its humour as corrosive - rarely did you feel the need to hold your hands over your eyes, horror-movie-style - but at its height it ranks as one of TV's greatest comedies.

Few spin-offs have honoured the original with such integrity while working so intelligently on their own terms. And I can't think of any other comedy that so satirically skewers the work conventions and practices of middle America with such deadpan relish - though Daniels is doing something similar with the wily Parks and Recreation. That comedy, set in the world of small-town politics rather than the claustrophobic world of modern American office life and starring Amy Poehler, is another endorsement of the kind of idiosyncratic sensibility that is in short supply on free-to-air commercial TV.

The Office followed the daily interactions of a group of disgruntled, idiosyncratic employees at paper company Dunder Mifflin's Scranton branch, presided over in its best seasons by hapless but indomitable manager Michael Scott (Golden Globe winner Steve Carell). Scott and his team of middle-class office workers whinged and moaned and just got on with whatever they did at Dunder Mifflin for 200 episodes (though Scott left several seasons before the finale). There was rarely dramatic ennui and the series was able to pull off several different comic ideas in every episode.

There has always been that pleasurable balance between comedy and drama, physical gags and wry conversational workplace humour; and a companionable gentleness underlying the abiding tone of social embarrassment and humiliation.

It maintained the mockumentary style of the original British series, the observational camera still the source of extra laughs as the characters used it for sounding off about each other and as a confessional, imparting information not shared by their colleagues.

"How did you do it?" the office receptionist, ever cheerful Erin (Ellie Kemper), asks in the finale, as clips from previous episodes flash across the screen. "How did you capture what it was really like? How we felt, and how we made each other laugh, and how we got through the day? How did you do it? Also, how do cameras work?"

Even after many episodes, The Office remained fresher than the newer if popular old-style sitcoms such as Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory, only Modern Family - another mockumentary - likely to enjoy its longevity. The old format shows are series to turn your back on, in perfect confidence that things will never really change; shows where the actors still close the door with their backs (admittedly that takes skill) so they can face the camera to show us their three expressions.

Carell's Scott was simply one of TV's great comic characters and he's back in the finale with one of the best lines. Carell had previously indicated he would not appear at the finish, reportedly because he didn't want to overshadow the rest of the cast. His return gracefully pulls no focus and he utters just this one line. Looking at his old colleagues, a teary-eyed Scott says: "I feel like all my kids grew up and then they married each other. It's every parent's dream."

Blessed - or cursed - with the same overzealous enthusiasm that simultaneously impresses and annoys anyone with whom he is involved, Michael Scott always had one eye fixed on the impossible and on pushing his talent beyond its established limit. Carell has that rare comedic gift of being able to switch moods without offering a signal, as, like all great comics, his mind operates on several wavelengths at once.

The others are all there in the last episode too: lovely, lovely Pam (Jenna Fischer) and long-suffering Jim (John Krasinski), high-maintenance Angela (Angela Kinsey), and the wonderfully surreal Dwight Schrute, Dunder Mifflin's assistant regional manager, played by the irascible Rainn Wilson, like Carell, another of television's genuine originals.

The cast all gets a chance to say goodbye this week, their story arcs completed. Most are happy to move on, if sadly, and they leave us as old friends, ultimately perfect in their fragility and the worn dignity with which they have endured their lives working at Dunder Mifflin.

As Pam says in the final scene, talking to the unseen documentarians: "I think it was a bit weird when you picked us to make a documentary; but, all in all, I think an ordinary paper company like Dunder Mifflin was a great subject for a documentary. There's a lot of beauty in ordinary things. Isn't that kind of the point?"

Boardwalk Empire, Monday, 3.30pm, Showcase.

The Office, Wednesday, 10.30pm, Eleven.