Editor’s Note: In the beginning, RedFence did not watch television. Not one principle contributor had a cable hookup. Seriously. Go ahead, call us snobs.
Then TV came to DVD and we saw that some of it was good. And then someone said, “Let there be Hulu,” and we saw that some of it was good and easily available. And we started watching and talking and . . . well that’s what RF is all about. So we created TV Worth Watching, a discussion of the various corners of the tele-sphere that actually hold our attention. It’s a review series, blog, thing. We think it’s pretty good.
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TV Worth Watching: Deadwood Season One
by James Roland
I was weaned off television during college. With no time and no tube I went three years without The Simpsons or M*A*S*H reruns. When I tried again, I was stunned with the flood of mediocre sitcoms, police dramas, and superhero doctor shows. Then, late last year, word of mouth drew me to a few television shows that were fantastic and usually struggling in the ratings. They captured hearts and then got canceled. Thank God for DVD.
Among the short-lived shows I missed in my TV-celibacy was the three-season run of Deadwood on HBO. I had only heard one thing about it:
They use extremely intense profanity. A lot.
When I caught a few static-filled moments from pirated cable in a Tijuana hotel (long story), it wasn’t enough to form a judgment, except that the above statement was true. Upon a friend’s claim that Deadwood was “the best TV show I’ve ever seen. And I hate Westerns” I borrowed the boxed set of season one and popped one in before going to bed.
Bad idea.
Two hours later I was fighting that knotted feeling in my stomach that I get when my body is begging for rest. But I had to finish . . . just . . . one . . . more . . . .
If you catch just one episode of Deadwood, you probably won’t understand what the fuss is about. Luckily, it’s only available on DVD now, so just pop season one, disc one, to the top of the Netflix queue and prepare for an awesome addiction.
The show is set in the late 1800s in the titular Deadwood, a camp in the Dakota Territory of America. With no government control the camp is a free market of goods, money, and power. And with no private sheriff it’s also a cesspool of human depravity.
Set amidst and against the scoundrels and thieves is, arguably, Deadwood‘s hero: Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant). While the show has a massive ensemble cast and Bullock gets only marginally more screen time than anyone else, he stands out as the only character (at first) with a strong, driving set of principles. He sees right and wrong in glaring shades of black and white. It’s not long before he catches the attention of Wild Bill Hickock (Keith Carradine), who spends most of his time ignoring the riffraff that wants to lick his boots or shoot him in the back.
Soon the two unintentionally gather a small, unofficial gang of well-intentioned folks that, for all intents and purposes, serves as ‘the good guys.’ The supporting characters are simple at first but bloom into three dimensions as the season progresses. In particular, Doc Cochran (Brad Dourif) and Calamity Jane (Robin Weigert) give stunning portrayals of socially awkward misfits with hearts of gold.
Except, this isn’t a normal Western. There is no ultimate goal, no damsel for the good cowboy to save from an evil ranch owner. All the characters in Deadwood simply want to survive the harsh American frontier, which — brilliantly — gives everyone the same motivation. Including the bad guys.
Saloon owner Al Swearengen may be the greatest television ‘villain’ ever written. He’s played by Ian McShane with such mesmerizing gravity and nuance that, as you can see, I felt compelled to write his name outside the post-character parenthetical amendment normally reserved for actors in reviews. How he has escaped the Academies throwing Oscars and Emmys at his head is beyond me. Swearengen appears at first to be pure evil. When he’s not feeding his competition’s corpse to a pig, he’s assigning his cronies to murder little girls. But just when he seems unbearably vile, the writers introduce Cy Tolliver (Powers Boothe). Tolliver fits the same archetype as Swearengen, but his actions are so unspeakably sinister he makes Swearengen’s infanticidal actions seem like Mother Teresa’s charity work.
Thus begins the main thrust of season one, revealing just how much Swearengen cares about Deadwood and the lengths he’ll go to (and the moral lines he’s willing to blur) to make sure it stays intact. It’s hard to describe the plot to Deadwood because it’s not episodic. There is not a weekly conundrum that must be solved. Instead, characters drive the story line, interweaving with each other in an almost day-to-day account of life in Deadwood. At the same time, as the credits role on each episode, the story has progressed an astonishing amount since you hit PLAY on your DVD remote.
In this way, the show has a cumulative effect. You learn so much about the characters that simple things, like a facial expression or someone dancing a jig, carry great emotional weight. This is one of the things that might have made it hard for Deadwood to find the ratings it needed to stay alive; it’s almost impossible to start watching mid-season.
Also, it takes a bit of time to get used to the vernacular. When it was on the air, there was a lot of press about the way the characters talked. Not just the profanity, but the speech patterns and archaic vocabulary as well.
One of the season one DVD special features explains that a lot of research went into the dialogue. The modern profanity is not anachronistic; it existed in the 1800s and was often used, the creators said. Also, a high level of illiteracy led to people learning the English vocabulary verbally, which meant a high level of slang. The writers took this into account, along with the fact that people of the era who did read learned from Victorian novels. So they wove an odd tapestry of old words, modern profanity, and loquacious speech patterns that almost rival Shakespeare in terms of beauty. This similarity to the Bard is intentional, and the writers often find excuses for characters to talk to themselves, resulting in some spellbinding soliloquies.
All these elements lead to a brilliant show, but not the broad audience needed to keep a show alive. I’ve only seen the first two seasons, but if season three is as brilliant as those, the cancellation of Deadwood ranks among the great television tragedies (::cough::FIREFLY::cough::).
Deadwood can be seen on DVD
