Boardwalk Empire, Sky Atlantic

"We've got a product a fella's got to have," decreed Nucky Thompson, the County Treasurer in Atlantic City the day Prohibition came into force. "Better still, we've got a product he's not allowed to have."

For Nucky and his cronies running the garish New Jersey resort, with a brazen criminality that makes our homegrown likes of T Dan Smith look like laughable amateurs in the art of graft, Prohibition was the best business opportunity they were ever going to have. They'd taken judicious steps to guarantee supplies of illegal liquor, either distilled or imported, and now they could add on a 2000 per cent mark-up. They'd never had it so good.

'The Federal Prohibition Agents tasked with stamping out illegal liquor look like an army of square-jawed automatons'

This frontier tale from the Roaring Twenties has bags of potential and has already been deluged with buckets of hype and industry awards, but it must be said that keeping abreast of the opening episode was harder work than it ought to have been. Once I'd watched it twice the pieces fell into place - in fact it wasn't that complicated, it was just that director Martin Scorsese kept snipping the narrative strands into short segments and jumbling them up. And not letting you hear all the dialogue properly - a bizarrely regular occurrence in American telly drama. In last night's episode two, you could start to see the bones through the skin as the plot-wheels began to grind in earnest (Kelly Macdonald as Margaret Schroeder, pictured below).

The show's secret weapon looks likely to be Steve Buscemi's performance as Nucky. The ratty, skeletal Buscemi is hardly conventional leading-man material. You can almost see daylight through his ribs and he always looks as if he's about to cough blood into his handkerchief, so I wondered for a while if he might prove too mercurial a presence to carry the role. But his combination of shiftiness, amorality, ruthlessness and greed is proving potent enough, though perhaps Scorsese could have saved us the little glimpses of hurt and sadness within (yeah, right) until the piece is more firmly on its feet.

But Buscemi is going to have to keep blazing at a million watts, because there's a mysterious personality deficit in some of his fellow cast members. There have been suggestions that Boardwalk is the new Sopranos. Well, they're both set in New Jersey, but what was so miraculous about The Sopranos was the phenomenal depth of talent in the cast. Even once you'd got past the front-line names like Tony, Carmela and Christopher, even the seemingly lowliest henchmen were capable of stepping out of the shadows and suddenly taking over an episode.

Boardwalk isn't quite so blessed. For instance, his ambitious underling Jimmy Darmody (Michale Pitt), though equipped with a piquant back story about his hideous experiences in the trenches of World War One, so far feels indistinct and underwritten, which meant that his impetuous decision to go into the armed-robbery business with the young Al Capone felt more like an aberration than a considered narrative event. Kelly Macdonald, playing the battered wife of the thuggish Schroeder (who was last seen sleeping in a pile of fishes on the harbourside), is being teed up as the replacement for Nucky's dead wife, over whose picture he moons dolefully. Unfortunately Kelly's job description appears to be "piteous little mouse with insipid Irish accent" (Stephen Graham as Al Capone, pictured below).

On the law enforcement side of the coin, the Federal Prohibition Agents tasked with stamping out illegal liquor look like an army of square-jawed automatons ("unswerving in duty, incorruptible in character"). They're epitomised by lead agent Van Alden (Michael Shannon), who resembles a drawing out of an old Superman cartoon.

Meanwhile, Atlantic City, 1920-style, has been lavishly reconstructed. The boardwalk, with its fortune-telling salons and Salt Water Taffy parlours, and period advertisements for Tootsie Rolls or Chesterfield cigarettes, is both fanatically detailed and consciously stagey, as though we're stepping into a historical mirage. It's this "field of dreams" notion that, one hopes, Boardwalk Empire will expand and develop.

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Watch the trailer for Boardwalk Empire