I don't really think it can be seriously maintained that we are in a golden age of television as a whole -- a look at the prime time network listings simply won't permit it. But clearly there is now a defined niche of quality television. HBO gets the lion's share of credit for creating it. The best shows on HBO in recent years have been not only the best things on TV -- that goes without saying -- but have been some of the best American narratives in any form.
I came late to Deadwood, never having watched it when it was on the air. I've just finished watching what unfortunately became its final season. Although I knew of the legend of David Milch as TV's mad genius, I was resistant to the show based on its premise -- I simply had no interest in the Western as a genre, and while I understood that Deadwood's ambitions were different from those of the standard Western, I was still reluctant to watch a show set in that time and place.
When I finally did start watching the first season on DVD, it took no more than a few minutes for my resistance to dissolve completely. As a writer, I find the show to be a sort of master class, and I study it as much as I watch it. While there are many aspects of the show that merit discussion (and perhaps future posts), I want to focus on three: its supporting characters, its language, and its themes.
Deadwood is frequently called Shakespearean, and rightly so. But while this comparison is sparked by the density of the rhetoric through which the characters communicate, it can also be seen in the show's minor characters. As in Shakespeare, Deadwood's minor characters often serve as comic foils to the darker hues of the main action. They are sometimes broad, and some are close to caricature: the relationship between E.B. Farnum and Richardson, for example, whose narrative purpose is clearly comic relief. But others have far more subtle shadings: the friendship between Joanie Stubbs and Charlie Utter, for example, which is a sort of asexual romance.
What distinguishes almost all of Deadwood's characters, no matter how minor, is their strangeness. There is something fundamentally unknowable about almost all of them. Calamity Jane, for example, is obviously drinking herself to death and has at some fundamental level lost the will to live. Every scene she is in has a dance of advance and retreat, people reaching out to her and her instinctive withdrawal from them.
This is even more true of the show's villains, who are portrayed as prisoners of their own nature, rather than people who, through free will, make destructive choices. Francis Wolcott, in the second season, takes no pleasure from the violence he inflicts, and seems to accept the hatred others have for him as what he deserves. George Hearst in the third season is the will to power divorced from every other human impulse. The world of Deadwood is Hobbesian in the extreme -- the closest and most enduring relationships are no more or less than alliances, and alliances are hardly the deepest of relationships.
Next: The language of Deadwood.
Nice comments on the show. I felt the same way about Deadwood when I first heard about it, I had no interest at all. On a whim I started watching the first episode and have been completely consumed with it. After watching an episode I almost feel like I am living in Deadwood. The sets and costumes are excellent.
Posted by: mark | August 22, 2008 at 12:02 AM