TV Review: Deadwood
Deadwood is truly a fantastic series, but it feels like it took a lot out of me. And I don’t mean that it was emotionally overwhelming or anything. It was just very slow moving, and the ensemble cast had so many character sharing roughly equal screentime that it had me looking up who people were pretty often. It’s generally not my favourite kind of show, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad, and I think there’s an argument to be made that this is kind of a western version of The Sopranos. Sure, a different plot and all that, but in terms of all the characters and such.
A few stand out more than others, most notably Al Swearengen (Ian McShane), a ruthless saloon/brothel owner and criminal who does the right thing just enough to make him unpredictable. And McShane is really fantastic.
It’s easily one of the best television performances I’ve ever seen, and deserves to be up there with Cranston in Breaking Bad and Gandolfini in The Sopranos. He’s brutal, witty, hilarious, and at times mysterious.
If the show has a protagonist, it’s Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant), a hardware store owner who eventually becomes sheriff of Deadwood. Like Swearengen and many others in the series, he’s based on a real historical person, and while he sometimes takes a backseat in the series in a way that Swearengen never does, he’s the most unflappable and principled character in the show.
So what’s the show about, exactly? Well that’s not so simple. It’s far from a traditional narrative, and who knows if it might have developed into one, had it been afforded more than just three seasons. But it still manages to be interesting most of the time, and not just because of the acting.
The show depicts Deadwood at an important transitionary period in the town’s history. It’s about to be absorbed the Dakota Territory, and thus the goings on of the town are forced to change dramatically. We see it move from a completely lawless frontier town to a town in which the law struggles to stand up against the lawlessness.
There are plenty of historical tie-ins here. I think it’s mostly a fictional story, though plenty of characters of course are real, and a few of them are even pretty famous. Wild Bill Hickok (Keith Carradine) is here, but spoilers, he obviously gets killed pretty early on. The biggest historical character here has got to be his friend Calamity Jane (Robin Weigert), who’s probably my least favourite part of the show.
It’s not a bad performance, but it’s kind of a difficult one to watch, with how Weigert slurs all her words (most of which are vulgarities). And I always felt like the show never really justified the amount of screentime that she got. After Hickok was killed, it felt like she had no purpose in the story, but she was still always there.
There are some excellent female characters, though, in a couple of prostitutes: Trixie (Paula Malcomson) and Joanie Stubbs (Kim Dickens), the latter of whom starts out working for the ruthless and wonderful Cy Tolliver (Powers Boothe, giving perhaps the second best performance of the series), and eventually has a relationship with Jane.
They’re both a lot of fun to watch, and the show never shies away from how miserable life was like for women in the Old West (especially with widow Alma Garret [Molly Parker]).
Overall, it’s certainly an excellent show, but at times it can be a bit of a chore to watch. It’s so authentic in its recreation of the Old West that it’s genuinely ugly to look at, which I both liked and didn’t like. I also think while season 3 may have been my favourite, I do think I enjoyed the story a bit more when it was more Bullock vs. Swearengen. When Hearst (Gerald McRaney) becomes a big part of the show and the main antagonist, it doesn’t seem to work as much, though season 3 still has outstanding moments and episodes.
It’s a fine effort from HBO. It’s a shame it was cancelled.
Rating: 8/10
