To say you love Deadwood is like saying you love the worst people in town (it was making us fall for antiheroes long before Walter White broke bad), but aren't those the most interesting people to know?īest Character to Follow: Every character in Deadwood is colorful, to put it mildly.
At the end of the day we're all hoopleheads, and c*cksuckers, and motherf*ckers-it's just that in Deadwood, everyone's up front about it. And it will always one day become evident that those two people really aren't that different at all. There will always be generally honest people like hardware-store-owner-turned-sheriff Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant), and there will always be guys like saloon/whorehouse operator Al Swearengen (Ian McShane) who ruthlessly pursue their own interests. Most are based on real people who, although liberties were taken, actually did a lot of what happens on Deadwood-right down to the moment Wild Bill Hickok met his end.)ĭeadwood, in that sense, is a microcosm of every new society. (If you really want to fact-check, watch the show with your laptop open and Google the characters. If you've ever wondered why America seems incapable of going a month without some political or corporate scandal, throw on an episode of Deadwood and realize that the nation was largely built by crooks who would do anything to get rich or get by. ("Gabriel's trumpet will produce you from the ass of a pig." Direct quote.) It's also a people's history of the United States from a time (1876) before Deadwood itself was even part of the union. What Milch created with Deadwood was something of an American masterpiece-a piece of historical fiction where pimps, whores, gold miners, and tomboy drunks give profanity-laden soliloquies worthy of Shakespeare. Deadwood is a funny show alright, but that’s because, in the unflagging brilliance of its execution, it fulfills its ambition.It's a shame. They have staked themselves to a dramatic idea that, in its openly literary ambition, could have been laughable. While this linguistic artfulness serves the necessary caution of Deadwood’s inhabitants, it signals the sheer audacity of David Milch and his writers.
Garrett, I do not know how your husband’s skull got caved in.” Say no more, doc. When the man’s widow (Molly Parker) presses the doc on whether he was murdered, the doc-who fears Swearengen like everyone else-responds with a perfect touch of overstatement: “Mrs. The camp’s doctor (Brad Dourif, in perhaps the finest performance of his weird career) examines the corpse of a man who apparently fell to his death, but who was actually pushed off a ridge and then bludgeoned, as he lay groaning on the rocks, by one of Swearengen’s men. Indeed, one of the pleasures of Deadwood is observing what characters are doing when they speak, where they’re heading, whom they’re trying to fool and what secret messages they’re transmitting. When a Deadwood character talks he’s almost never saying just one thing. Given the show’s treacherous context, the formality of much of the dialogue offers all kinds of room for strategic insincerity and corrosive irony.
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