The remarkable first season of Deadwood
represents one of those periodic, wholesale reinventions of the
Western that is as different from, say, Lonesome Dove as that
miniseries is from Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo or the latter is
from Anthony Mann's The Naked Spur. In many ways, HBO's
Deadwood embraces the Western's unambiguous morality during the
cinema's silent era through the 1930s while also blazing trails
through a post-NYPD Blue, post-The West Wing
television age exalting dense and customized dialogue. On top of
that, Deadwood has managed an original look and texture for a
familiar genre: gritty, chaotic, and surging with both dark and
hopeful energy. Yet the show's creator, erstwhile NYPD Blue
head writer David Milch, never ridicules or condescends to his more
grasping, futile characters or overstates the virtues of his heroic
ones.
Set in an ungoverned stretch of South Dakota soon
after the 1876 Custer massacre, Deadwood concerns a lawless,
evolving town attracting fortune-seekers, drifters, tyrants, and
burned-out adventurers searching for a card game and a place
to die. Others, particularly women trapped in prostitution, sundry
do-gooders, and hangers-on have nowhere else to go. Into this pool
of aspiration and nightmare arrive former Montana lawman Seth
Bullock (Timothy Olyphant) and his friend Sol Starr (John Hawkes),
determined to open a lucrative hardware business. Over time, their
paths cross with a weary but still formidable Wild Bill Hickok
(Keith Carradine) and his doting companion, the coarse angel
Calamity Jane (Robin Weigert); an aristocratic, drug-addicted widow
(Molly Parker) trying to salvage a gold mining claim; and a
despondent hooker (Paula Malcomson) who cares, briefly, for an
orphaned girl. Casting a giant shadow over all is a blood-soaked
king, Gem Saloon owner Al Swearengen (Ian McShane), possibly the
best, most complex, and mesmerizing villain seen on TV in years.
Over 12 episodes, each of these characters, and many others, will
forge alliances and feuds, cope with disasters (such as smallpox),
and move--almost invisibly but inexorably--toward some semblance of
order and common cause. Making it all worthwhile is Milch's
masterful dialogue--often profane, sometimes courtly and civilized,
never perfunctory--and the brilliant acting of the aforementioned
performers plus Brad Dourif, Leon Rippy, Powers Boothe, and Kim
Dickens. --Tom Keogh
