William’s earnest boyfriend, Mercer, and dutiful sister, Regan, figure into the picture uptown. Sam’s friend Charlie joins their ranks to seek the truth about her shooting. His replacement is Nicky Chaos, a pyromaniacal Svengali ruling a cadre known as the Phalanx. The band playing downtown on the fateful night once featured William Hamilton-Sweeney, junkie painter son of the family. The series’ final installment invokes the regional blackout of August 2003, echoing that of the book’s late chapters set in July 1977. The show does the inverse: The shooting takes place on the Fourth of July, then we return to the previous winter. The book opens at the holidays, with its critical action on New Year’s Eve, then revisits the summer that led there. As Sam lies in a coma over the following weeks, investigations home in on ties between the downtown musicians, led by a self-styled militant, and the Hamilton-Sweeney tycoon clan hosting the party that night. When Sam leaves the show to see someone at the party, an unidentified acquaintance pursues her into Central Park, fires twice and leaves her for dead. The plot centers on the shooting of an NYU freshman, Samantha, the night of a downtown rock show and an uptown penthouse soiree. But the mise-en-scene suffers inexplicably and lacks resonance with our more recent era. (They’re best known for “Gossip Girl” and “The O.C.”) The new series’ quicker pace tightens the main narrative thread and builds momentum the book sometimes lost. Predictably, the showrunners resolve the book’s ambivalence by closing in on the crime story, sacrificing much of its idiosyncrasy. The book, more than 900 pages, was an exhaustive inventory of its ensemble’s lives, each in some way an emblem of its time. For their Apple TV+ miniseries concluding Friday, Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage adapted the story to take place in 2002-03 - or a muted, blurry version thereof. The text was set in the New York City of 1976-77, a well-trod milieu in TV and film. Predictably, it landed in development purgatory. Upon release it sold well but received middling reviews. By the time it came out in 2015, Garth Risk Hallberg’s novel “City on Fire” was notorious for its scope of ambition, unheard-of advance and early acquisition by Scott Rudin.
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