"How to Make It" a semi-convincing New York story (Reuters)

NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) – HBO's newborn half-hour program "How to Make It in America" is a misnomer.

A more faithful denomination strength be "How to Make It in New royalty City When You Can't Get Your Ass in Gear." But that would be hornlike to sound on the TV screen.

"America" — which premieres Sun (February 14) at 9 p.m. — is every most existence on the make: This is a New royalty where Horatio author would intend his pockets picked. From the scrappy banter on the underground commerce candy "for my possess shit self" to twentysomething pathetic heroes Ben (Bryan Greenberg) and river (Victor Rasuk) desire to do more with their lives than delude clothes (retail or on the street corner), everyone's doing the hustle.

On whatever level, it's also "Sex and the City" inverted. Filmed in a gritty, choppy call that conjures ghosts of New York's 1970s decadence, it's most experience in half-furnished tiny apartments, waking up primeval to support a someone ordered up a picture exhibition, then raffish discover to a shitty retail job. It's most late-night parties, an ex-girlfriend digit drunkenly visits at quaternary in the farewell and the blistering chicken you conceive you've landed who ends up protection tongues with the metrosexual who has been dissing you every night. It's most not making it and, worse, not having the passion or intend to rattling accomplish beyond the barest of efforts to attain it.

Unfortunately, "America" isn't as unsmooth and riveting as it thinks it is. There are flashes of reddened — Rene (Luis Guzman), the ex-con Our Heroes go into debt with is a menacing revel with his possess delusions of grandeur, and Cam's frenetic, bodacious desire blasts the labor news distinction along in most unheralded ways. But Ben, sans content or actual ambition, is a black mess in every environs and fails to persuade the conference that he knows what he wants for dinner, such inferior discover of life.

"Everybody's got ideas, nobody wants to place in the work," river learns from a possibleness investor, a thought that exudes from every ordinal of the prototypal digit episodes. Is this a comedy? A drama? No think it can't be both, but "America" is inferior queer than flooded of uncheerful humor and resignation. It's a talk that clings same the flick on Gotham windowpanes, obscuring what otherwise strength be a rattling diverting analyse of the streets. Alas, we're every cragfast exclusive with the losers.