We tried to talk about Deadwood without swearing. We failed.
HBO’S Deadwood was infuriatingly short-lived, but in three seasons it still managed to craft some of the greatest — and sweariest — TV drama ever produced, before or since. Dan Jolin takes us on a trip back to fucking Deadwood
LIKE A FLASH of gunfire, Deadwood
burned bright and vanished fast. David Milch’s short-lived Western was grubby, elegant, profane, poetic, brutal and beautiful. It arrived on HBO during the initial surge of TV’S new Golden Age, after The Sopranos and The Wire had already elevated the bar for adult drama. But it was a bar that Deadwood
swiftly and effortlessly reached.
Suffused with dialogue as eloquently rich as it was trash-mouthed and populated by characters so morally complex that even their grey areas had grey areas, Deadwood
deserves to be considered alongside the aforementioned HBO hits, along with the soon-to-follow Breaking Bad on AMC, as the best long-form experience TV has offered. It was, wrote The New York Times’ Alessandra Stanley in 2005, “a Western the way La Grande Illusion was a war movie or Vertigo
was a horror film”.
Yet its roguish charms are not as widely appreciated as those of its peers, primarily because its potential was mercilessly cut short. In 2006, just two years and three seasons after its debut, Deadwood abruptly ended — partly the result of a co-production deal with Paramount whose terms HBO no longer found favourable, and partly due to the sheer cost of maintaining its sprawling, stunningly detailed town set on Melody Ranch in the Santa Clarita Valley. As The Sopranos and The Wire pressed on to completion, Deadwood fell away, half-formed, its characters and plotlines left dangling; a frustratingly unfinished masterwork.
Until now. With Milch and the cast reunited on HBO for a feature-length farewell, Deadwood: The Movie, it has finally been made whole. What finer time, then, to get our hands dirty and dig into the reasons why Deadwood deserves to stand high among the pantheon of TV’S greatest
IT WAS NO MERE WESTERN
David Milch was a former teacher of literature at Yale and the showrunner of seminal cop drama NYPD Blue, whose difficult reputation (actors would often not receive their scripts from him until the morning of their shoot) was outweighed by his impressive results. You might imagine the mythical sweep of the Old West was something he long felt compelled to tackle and remould, but when HBO first met Milch for lunch in early 2002, he had something quite different in mind: a show about urban Roman centurions during the reign of Emperor Nero, contending with the rise of Christianity after Jesus’ execution.
Milch’s verbose pitch took in the symbology of the cross, the apostle Paul’s epilepsy and the social organisation of baboons. HBO execs Chris Albrecht and Carolyn Strauss heard him out, then revealed they already had Rome in development. But, they added, they might be interested in a Western. “No problem,” replied the unfazed Milch.
During a thorough research process, Milch found his ideal replacement for first-century Rome in a gold-prospecting town in the South Dakota territory’s Black Hills during the 1870s. A town whose real inhabitants — including saloon owner Al Swearengen, hardware store owner Seth Bullock and frontiersman Charlie Utter — would form the hardened core of his dramatis personae. Even better, the legendary likes of Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane and Wyatt Earp all rocked up there at one point or another, while the town itself, Deadwood, began as an illegal camp, settled on land which had been granted to the Lakota people, their treaty with the US Government conveniently forgotten after the Black Hills gold rush started.
Thematically speaking, Deadwood was a gold mine for Milch, too. The foundation of Christianity transformed into an exploration of how society can form among a disparate group of lawless, murderous and morally derelict people, all galvanised by the promise of gold. Despite comparisons with George P. Cosmatos’ 1993 movie Tombstone, and the engagement of Walter Hill (The Long Riders, Wild Bill) as the first episode’s director, Milch’s reference points weren’t Western movies. “I always thought the genre had more to do with what the Hays office [Hollywood’s censorship body] would allow than what happened on the American frontier,” Milch told True West in 2006. Any viewer who went to Deadwood looking for gun-twirling cowboys, high-noon showdowns and azure-skied Monument Valley vistas came away disappointed. Milch was only interested in raw history, and how that was made amid the noisy, mud-slicked, urinestenched streets of a single town. One which, viewers swiftly realised, was populated by people who talked in a way that Western characters had never spoken before. ➜
its dialogue was damnnear flawless
“Pain or damage don’t end the world, or despair, or fuckin’ beatings. The world ends when you’re dead. Until then, you got more punishment in store. Stand it like a man — and give some back.”
It is highly unlikely the real Al Swearengen spoke like this. But Milch’s dialogue, as spoken here by series frontman Ian Mcshane, has such a vital and layered vibrancy it hardly matters. The parlance of Deadwood was as witty and florid as it was filled with F-bombs, and whether it involved Al dispensing his twisted wisdom, Calamity Jane (Robin Weigert) drunkenly using the word “triangulate”, or lickspittle hotelier E.B. Farnum (William Sanderson) delivering extensive soliloquies in iambic pentameter, it was a weekly joy to behold. “I don’t think anybody has ever written for television like that,” Brad Dourif, aka Deadwood sawbones Doc Cochran, told Yahoo Movies in 2014. “It was based on reading a lot of stuff that people wrote in that era. David made people talk like they wrote, which was a very interesting choice.”
But many people couldn’t get past the cussing. According to one count, the word “fuck” is heard more than 3,000 times during the show’s 36 episodes. That’s just over one “fuck” a minute. Milch found it easy to defend. “That’s the way they spoke,” he shrugged in 2004. Even if historians have since contested this, it hardly matters. Deadwood was a lawless town, so it makes sense the language itself should feel appropriately lawless to our modern ears.
Also, strangely, the swearing connects this little, fractious community. “Profanity, I’ve come to believe, was the lingua franca of the time and place,” Milch told American Heritage in 2006. “But there’s so much more to the dialogue than profanity. The language of the characters in the show is never generic, everyone is different. They come from different backgrounds, different parts of the country, and they all express themselves a little differently.”
it Had al swearengen
The characters themselves were never generic, either. The closest to an archetype was Timothy Olyphant’s straight-arrow marshal, Seth Bullock, who spoke with an Eastwood-esque rasp and had a rather more monochromatic view of right and wrong than his fellow Deadwood denizens. But he was just as flawed, being quick to anger and dangerously inflexible. Thanks to a cast packed with superb character performers — John Hawkes, Powers Boothe, Garrett Dillahunt, Molly Parker, Paula Malcolmson, Brian Cox and Anna Gunn to name a few — you never felt short-changed when spending time with any of the Black Hills’ motley squatters… Especially if they were Weigert’s invariably inebriated Jane or Dourif’s irascible Doc Cochran.
Yet one presence towered above them all, leaning over his raw-board office balcony as his cold, blue eyes scanned Main Street for signs of opportunity and weakness. Al Swearengen was a plumb role originally earmarked for Married… With Children’s
Ed O’neill, but thankfully bagged by Ian Mcshane, until then best known for playing charming antiques dealer Lovejoy on BBC1 during the ’80s and ’90s. Mcshane invests the wily brothel owner and on-the-sly crime lord with an almost unbearable charisma, testing our fascination with him almost by the scene through his various acts of ferocity and villainy. In the first episode, soon after enjoying a bit of his silky saloon-bar patter, we see him throw the already beaten prostitute Trixie (Malcolmson) across a room, press his foot on her throat and twist her arm almost to breaking point. For all his charms, he was the alpha antagonist, yet, gradually, ingeniously, over 36 episodes this vile, murderous man began to earn our sympathy. Relatively speaking, of course. Worse men would arrive in Deadwood — Boothe’s Cy Tolliver, Dillahunt’s Francis Wolcott and Gerald Mcraney’s big, bad business-bastard George Hurst. And as for traditional ‘heroes’, well, Bullock aside, they never lasted long.
it Knew How to SHOCK us
Seven years before Ned Stark (Sean Bean) got his head lopped off at the Sept of Baelor in Game Of Thrones, Deadwood delivered its
own surprise first-season death. One which also befell one of the cast’s biggest names, in this case Keith Carradine as Wild Bill Hickok (in an episode which, coincidentally, was directed by the same guy: HBO stalwart Alan Taylor). Except Milch didn’t wait so late as the ninth episode to do it. Wild Bill checked out in the fourth.
Anyone who knows their frontier history knew that the real Wild Bill was gunned down in the real Deadwood ( just as anyone who’d read the book A Game Of Thrones knew Ned’s fate), but we had no idea it would happen so soon. Bill’s story was building; he clocked out just as his troublesome celebrity presence was starting to infiltrate the plotlines in an interesting and encouraging way. It sent the audience a message, the same message Thrones would send later, and The Walking Dead, too: that life in this desperate world is lived on a knife’s edge and nobody, no matter how central their character, is safe.
Only one episode before, guileless New York-born prospector Brom Garret (Timothy Omundson), another seemingly key character, was bludgeoned to death in a creek. And perhaps most distressing of all was the random death of Bullock’s nephew/stepson William (Josh Eriksson), knocked down by a horse in the second season’s ninth episode.
Milch hardly held back on the grisliness, either: we had the torture and murder of a young thief (played by Kristen Bell), a full-on cut-throat razor slaughter in the Chez Ami bordello, and a street fight which squirmily crescendoed with a popped eyeball.
It says something, however, that the most excruciating moment in all three seasons was not a death, but the prevention of one: when Doc Cochran has to extract Al’s kidney stone, without anaesthetic, by extracting it through his urethra. Like Al himself said, if you’re not dead, you’ve only got more punishment in store.
IT HAD NARRATIVE DEPTH
Milch loved to wrong-foot and sometimes even distress his audience with Deadwood’s
grim antics. But he didn’t simply do this because he was a sadist, or eager to punish anyone who tuned in expecting the relatively clean-cut, do-right frontier adventures of Rawhide or Bonanza. Beneath all the swearing, rutting and bloodletting lay an important and unsettling message: this is how civilisation, specifically America, was built.
The core question Milch explored with the show was, he said, “How does order evolve into chaos?” The foundations of modern society, he suggested with Deadwood, are greed, theft, murder and chicanery. Similar to Daniel Day-lewis’ Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood,
Al Swearengen is a monster whose singleminded and selfish exertions ultimately make him a pillar of society.
Of course, he has to temper his ways and ally himself with the upstanding likes of Seth Bullock, especially when Hearst presents a greater threat. But for all his misanthropy, Al is a man who people look up to and gather around while Deadwood upgrades from lawless camp to town, complete with its own bank, mine and eventually — as we’ll see in the new movie — railroad.
Even though Deadwood didn’t end properly the first time around, the final shot of its 36th episode, ‘Tell Him Something Pretty’, felt horribly fitting: Al on his knees, scrubbing blood off the floor. He’d just killed an innocent girl to protect a friend and, ultimately, save the burgeoning town. Order has a terrible cost, and we need people like Al to pay it. Perhaps in Milch’s overdue finale, his final flash of gunfire, we’ll finally discover what it cost Al himself. All three seasons of deadwood and deadwood the movie Are Available on now tv