Deadwood, revisited

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Alessandra Stanley has an article in The New York Times about a great television series:

After watching the pilot episode of Deadwood, I got up, lowered the blinds, dimmed the lights and burned through the rest of the DVD in a fugue of wonder and excitement. I didn’t leave the series until the next day, staggering limply into the harsh sunlight like Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend.
It was 2004, and I had been the chief television critic at The New York Times for about a year. HBO had sent me advance screeners of its new western. And I was discovering binge watching.
There are dramas that are arguably better, or at least more widely appreciated, than Deadwood: The Sopranos, The Wire, or Breaking Bad. But of all the shows I have reviewed over the past twelve years, Deadwood is the one I would most like to see again for the first time.
In that first jolt of surprise and enthrallment, it felt as if David Milch had created Deadwood just for me (I’ve always loved Westerns) twisting the genre to invent something new. I wrote at the time that Westerns were like men’s clothes or formal poetry: there is a certain liberty in their constraints, and some limitations inspire creativity. Deadwood turned out to be a television sonnet with a hip-hop beat. 

From left, Ian McShane, Timothy Olyphant, W. Earl Brown, and Sean Bridgers in Deadwood. 

Before Mad Men or The Americans found new ways to reclaim the past, this was a period piece ahead of its time, a modern drama set during the Dakota gold rush of the 1870s. A grim, washed-out palette of sepia and gray replaced the familiar Technicolor panoramas of John Ford westerns.
This depiction of the West was sophisticated and deeply layered, sometimes comical but always brutal. Fetid, crowded, filthy Deadwood wasn’t just primitive, it was primal. Murdered men were fed to pigs. Sex in the brothels was almost as callous.
The characters spoke a new language, too, an incongruous mix of poetry and profanity that hasn’t been matched by any other show, not even the first season of True Detective. Milch spiked the commonplace blasphemy of the 1870s with obscenities so crude they would make rappers flinch.
But threaded through the spew of swear words would be sudden flights of near-Shakespearean eloquence. Comforting a slighted henchman, the town pimp and saloonkeeper, Al Swearengen (played by Ian McShane), was soothing: “Whatever lurks ahead, whatever grievous abominations and discord, you and me walk into it together, like always.”
Fans of the show, and I was one of the first, fell in love with Swearengen, the murderous, devious and world-weary Old West mob boss. The show had a putative hero, Seth Bullock (played by Timothy Olyphant), a former marshal turned shopkeeper, but Swearengen was the real star, a complicated, beguiling antihero high in the pantheon of the so-called difficult men of television’s second Golden Age.
I was even more smitten with Calamity Jane (played by Robin Weigert), the profane and drunken sidekick to Wild Bill Hickok (played by Keith Carradine), both historical figures reimagined by Milch. Jane dressed, drank, cursed and fought like a man, but when she looked at Wild Bill, her face softened with a spinsterish yearning that was heartbreaking. Then someone else would speak up and she would snap back to her usual snarling, bullying self.
Deadwood was lawless territory, which was interesting because Milch cut his teeth on Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue, the kind of contemporary cop shows that eventually all but killed the television Western. It seemed fitting that he would pay reparations by riffing on frontier lawlessness and disorder. In a 2004 interview, he told the journalist Ned Martel that he wanted to explore the “primordial ooze” of law enforcement. In Deadwood, the closest thing to justice was revenge with peer review.
Milch has a complicated history, and his next two shows for HBO, John From Cincinnati and the ill-fated Luck, were astonishingly flawed. But I admire his unsteadiness almost as much as I respect the more consistent brilliance of David Chase or Vince Gilligan. Milch’s ambitious, anarchic flops make the success of Deadwood all the more miraculous. The series reached the flash point of creativity, talent, and audacity needed for truly great television.
And, on reflection, Deadwood was more than than an exemplar of its era; it also served as a fitting metaphor for our time. Once the Internet took hold, television turned almost as lawless as the Black Hills, a gold-rush medium of ruthless prospectors, few rules and infinite potential.
But even Deadwood settled down and turned civic-minded by Season Two. Television may still be plagued by illegal streaming but, in the end, the Internet didn’t exterminate the networks, it just changed the way we watch their shows.
I came to the critic’s job from the news side, and I spent my early days focused on television coverage of the Iraq war and the 2004 election. Reality television was the other hot topic when I started, even if most of those shows— The Osbournes, The Bachelor, and Fear Factor— were more fun to analyze as expressions of the national id than to watch.
Then shows like Damages, Homeland, and The Americans started breaking through, and suddenly we were in a new age of exploration. One pleasure of being a critic was navigating the global reach that Netflix and other streaming sites brought to American viewers; it was exhilarating to discover foreign shows like Forbrydelsen, Borgen, and Spiral.
When I asked for the job, some of my colleagues were surprised, and a few could barely disguise their contempt for the medium, asking me pityingly how I could bear to watch all that junk. Twelve years later, the same people excitedly lobby me on behalf of new shows they have discovered. (If anything, it’s now the film critics they pity.)
Deadwood lasted for three seasons. But today those episodes are always within instant reach, on HBO Go and other places, and my viewing time, since I am leaving the beat, is now my own. Paradoxically, one of the rewards for not being a television critic is that you get to watch more television: Now I can stream Deadwood whenever I want, however I want.

Rico says he'll have to find it and rewatch it; Deadwood was one of his favorites...