Why Michael Stuhlbarg Left HBO's Boardwalk Empire

In "The Godfather Part II," Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) meets with the aged gangster Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg) in his modest Florida home. Roth muses, "I've loved baseball ever since Arnold Rothstein fixed the World Series of 1919." 

That reference isn't a movie embellishment. New York racketeer Arnold Rothstein really was alleged to have fixed the 1919 World Series in what's called "The Black Box Scandal," the blowback of which is explored in Season 1 of HBO's Prohibition period piece "Boardwalk Empire," featuring Michael Stuhlbarg as Rothstein. "AR," as his men often call him, remains a fixture of "Boardwalk Empire" during its first four seasons, and Stuhlbarg gives one of the show's standout performances.

Historians describe Rothstein as the one who put the "organized" in organized crime, thanks to a sharp knack for math and business. Stuhlbarg's Rothstein lives up to the history books. He's often shown playing pool or gambling and notes a great gambler never makes a bet without fixing the odds in his favor. He's extremely eloquent but only polite except in the most surface-level ways. Ice water runs in his veins.

So, it's a shame that he doesn't even get a real ending. History says that Rothstein died in 1928. "Boardwalk Empire" Season 4 ends in 1924, and then its fifth and final eight-episode season jumps ahead to 1931. That meant the show skips over lots of real history, including Rothstein's death. He simply disappears from the series, save for vague references to his demise in Season 5. 

It's even more noticeable since his legacy hangs over the show's finale. "Boardwalk Empire" Season 5 includes a fictionalized account of how Rothstein's protégés "Lucky" Luciano (Vincent Piazza), Meyer Lansky (Anatol Yusef), and Benny "Bugsy" Siegel (Michael Zegen) took over the East Coast American mob. 

Rothstein's death is a pretty big missing chapter in Season 5's story, but a consequence of the larger "Boardwalk Empire" production. Looking in from the outside, "Boardwalk Empire" appears to be a show that got cut short. A fifth and final season that's only two-thirds as long as the previous ones? And which leaps past several years of story? It's hard to believe that was always the intention. It really feels like a series that ran out of runway and jumped ahead to the intended ending to resolve itself as best it could. (Mind you, Season 5 still has some great episodes.)

The often repeated narrative is that "Boardwalk Empire" cost too much for HBO for too little a return, so it had to go. It was an unavoidably expensive show that came with a lot of homework for its cast (being a period piece), costing a reported $5 million per episode. The reported episode ratings do also show a consistent downward slump across seasons. From "Boardwalk Empire" Seasons 1-4, each successive season premiere and season finale was watched by fewer people than the previous one, and by Season 4, the show was slipping below even two million viewers an episode.

Nonetheless, "Boardwalk Empire" creator Terence Winter maintained back in 2014 that ending the series was a creative call. Speaking with Time and Hitflix, Winter said he and his writers felt series lead Nucky Thompson (Steve Buscemi) was already nearing his story's end by Season 4. 1931 was chosen as the most natural endpoint because it's when Al Capone (Stephen Graham) went to prison, Luciano and Lansky began the mafia's Commission, and Prohibition was winding down. The cost was skipping over major events like Rothstein's murder, which in real life remains shrouded in mystery.

Reportedly, Rothstein owed $300,000 after a poker loss and refused to pay up, earning him a bullet to the gut on November 4, 1928. But he took his killer's identity to the grave. Rothstein's real death being unsolved would give "Boardwalk Empire" dramatic license to fill in the details. I'm confident it would've pulled it off since whenever Rothstein was onscreen, "Boardwalk Empire" became a more compelling show.

The ending of "Boardwalk Empire" Season 4 even directly teases more to come from Rothstein. He enters a business alliance with Nucky's ex-wife, Margaret Thompson (a pre-"Lanterns" Kelly Macdonald), who is working as a secretary at a New York City investment firm and agrees to slip Rothstein insider information. Instead, nothing comes of that.

Stuhlbarg deserves a mountain's worth of credit. The actor studied his character, including how the real Rothstein thought of himself as a businessman and held his conduct to such a standard, and he's said the "Boardwalk Empire" writers' room was "amiable" about implementing his own research into his character. Stuhlbarg was similarly gracious about not returning for Season 5, especially considering it wasn't even his choice to leave the show, saying during a 2014 press junket that:

"They had to act fast, and they had a lot of ground to cover. It was amazing that we all got as much coverage as we did, considering how many characters they were juggling. I had so much fun doing the show, and I had no regrets. And yeah, sure it would've been fun to have shown [Rothstein's death], but I thought what they came up with was very cool, as it was. I think if they could have, they would've shown it, but they didn't have the time."