@Trish
I know you started a thread on this last week but I can't find it. I watched the program again tonight and still find it very dark in both setting and subject matter. I did do a little research on the sex trade in NYC during the time period of the program. In the Lower East Side (the Bowery, what is now Chinatown and between Fulton (the fish market) and Houston and Mulberry Sts it was quite prevalent and open. There were no laws against prostitution as such. However, for the established houses the cost was high and probably only the upper classes were steady clients. For example, I looked up a "typewriter's" wages (the occupation of Dakota Fanning. The average income was $35.00 per month or about $8.50 per week. As a female at the time she probably would have made less. The average "trick" for high class hookers was $5.00 or almost a week's income for what would be a mid level clerk's position. Now, there were "cheap tricks" but they were more likely to service you on the street, in an alley way.
Sadly, its also true that underage male prostitution was almost as prevalent as female.
And Teddy Roosevelt was Police Commissioner in 1894, the time of the program and he did make a point of cleaning up the police department as much as he could.
Anyway, thats the background of the program. As to its artistic merits I can only say Dakota Fanning as grown up quite a bit since her "War of the Worlds" role. For me, the jury is still out but I will watch it again next week. I will also say its somewhat PC in its treatment of homosexuality and race relations. Maybe NYC has always been open about the former but certainly not the latter since there were laws in NYC that required segregation and the races were forced to live in separate areas.
We shall see I suppose.