'Boardwalk Empire' trailer

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Published on August 30, 2011 02:39PM EDT

The first season of Boardwalk Empire didn’t always cohere together as a sensible narrative — if that mid-season trip to the Republican National Convention served any purpose beyond wedging in some Warren G. Harding jokes, I’ll eat my fedora — but as a mechanism for getting great acting onscreen, it was a veritable perpetual motion engine. The cast of Boardwalk was so accomplished that one of its finest performers got surprisingly short shrift: Michael K. Williams, still best known as Omar from The Wire. From the look of things in the new trailer, Williams’ Chalky White may have a bigger role this season, if only because he appears to be the last guy still on Nucky Thompson’s side. While everyone else is plotting against him — Chicago, New York, Nucky’s friends, the law, the KKK — Chalky gets the stand-out line of the trailer: “You go school these crackers.” It sounds anachronistic, but I’ll ask a Linguistics Major before I make any judgments. Watch the trailer:

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