When one looks at the origins of the
Golden Age of Television, one must begin with HBO. Specifically, with the Holy
Trinity of Davids: Chase, Simon, and Milch. Though Oz served as the spark, we would not regard television the way to
do today without the three series that they created: The Sopranos, by Chase; The
Wire, and Deadwood, by David
Milch.
I approached all three series in different
ways. The Sopranos I got into at the
beginning, but the longer it aired I got more and more frustrated at it,
because the characters were unpleasant and didn’t evolve. Of course, not having
read Chase’s interviews on the subject, I didn’t realize that was the point: change is hard, and given the
choice, people will always take the path of least resistance.
The Wire
I got into during Season 2, and was instantly captivated. There’s
a very good chance I may have missed the point initially here as well; I
believed it was a brilliant portrait of urban decay combined with police
procedural; it wasn’t until the last season that I realized that it was really about the death of the American
Dream, and the breakdown of social institutions.
But with Deadwood, I didn’t start watching it until after the series was
over. I’d never been much of a fan of the Western as TV or movie, and I had no
idea what David Milch’s connection to television was. Even if I had been, I
probably would’ve been discouraged; I generally considered NYPD Blue one of the more overrated police dramas, and I didn’t
know his connection to Hill Street Blues at
all. I didn’t know the history behind the series, and I probably might’ve even
preferred Six Feet Under at the time.
But time has helped heal these wounds, and
I now realize just how great a series Deadwood
was, and how tragic it was that it was cut short without getting the proper
ending. But now that we are finally, after nearly twelve years of waiting,
about to receive closure in the form of a TV movie, I thought now would be the
time to take a look at this classic series.
Because Deadwood is unlike any show, I have ever tried to review; I think
we need a bit of history. And so we basically have to start with the creator.
Also a warning: Deadwood is one of
the most profane shows the medium has ever aired. In order to do justice to it,
I’m going to have to quote a lot of it. So if you are easily offended – well,
you probably wouldn’t have gotten this guide in the first place. Anyways, let’s
get started.
Any story of Deadwood has to begin with David Milch, who is clearly one of the
mediums greatest writers. He has battled with addiction most of his life, he
was a degenerate gambler and alcoholic, he studied and wrote under Robert Penn
Warren, he was a fraternity brother of George W. Bush. All of which probably
gave him more than adequate preparation for writing for television. Television,
however, wasn’t quite ready for Milch.
Milch’s first script was for Hill Street Blues, the classic episode
‘Trial By Fire’, where Frank Furillo basically uses the threat of a lynch mob
to get a man to confess to the murder of a nun – something that makes him end
the episode in confession. Milch was never quite able to be a good fit for the
upright Furillo, so as the series left Steven Bochco’s control and passed into
Milch’s, he would begin to dealing with the early shades of what would be
considered the antihero. In Hill Street, these
early muses would be played by Dennis Franz, first Bundetto, a murdering, degenerate cop; then
Norman Buntz, a man who played with a looser deck of rules.
The series where Milch had the most
influence was NYPD Blue. Initially a
series that seemed to generate response by how far it could push network
standards for profanity and nudity, Milch would eventually use to tell more
stories about the life and loves of police. By the end of the second season,
the show didn’t exactly have teleplays anymore. Milch would lie on the floor of
the writers room for hours, and a typist would scroll through the script. Milch
would make changes line by line, and sometimes word by word. The writer of the
episode would get his name on the script, but the bulk of the words, and more
important their order, came from Milch.
The language, over time, would become more
stylized and contorted, and I have to be honest, that’s part of the reason I
never got into the series. As I said in an earlier guide, the characters on NYPD Blue always sounded like they were
characters in a police drama. The characters in Homicide and The Wire, by
contrast, sounded like police. And if it could be frustrating to watch, it was
often frustrating for the actors reciting the dialogue. Dennis Franz and Gordon
Clapp managed to handle it the best (both actors would win multiple Emmys for
their work) and other actors, like Jimmy Smits, would become frustrated,
particularly considering that the longer the series was on the air, the more
convoluted the rewriting process got, with actors often not receiving scripts
until the day of shooting. Indeed, the death of Smits’ character Bobby Simone,
one of the most memorable series exits in the history of television, was caused
because Smits just could not deal with the process anymore.
Eventually, the process would exhaust even
Milch. By the end of his seventh season, his presence and writing would become
even more erratic, with him finally given actors their lines the day of
shootings. He left Blue at the end of
Season 7, and though he would try to duplicate his success with series like Brooklyn South and Big Apple, neither would last very long.
So, in 2002, he came up with an idea for a
series. He pitched to HBO the idea of a police drama set in Ancient Rome. Two
centurions were going to arrest St.
Paul, and he intended to tell the story of how the
rise of any civilization corresponds with the rise of law and order to protect
that civilization. He went to lunch with Chris Albrech6 and Carolyn Strauss,
the heads of programming for HBO. They loved the pitch. Problem was, they had a
show in development called Rome, by another great writer John Milius
(In one of the great ironies of
television, Rome
wouldn’t see the light of day until 2006, just after the cancellation of Deadwood. Loved and appreciated by
critics, it would be cancelled after two seasons for much of the same reasons Deadwood would be.)
So Milch decided to make a western. One
that would be set in the town of Deadwood, South Dakota, and focus around three
historical characters who would be there around the same time: Wild Bill
Hickok, the legendary gunslinger, Al Swearengen, owner of the Gem Saloon, and
Seth Bullock, the town’s first sheriff. He would populate the town with other
characters, historical and fictional; populate it with actors who have become
stalwarts of the new Golden Age, and turn out some of the most memorable
dialogue in the history of television.
Many things make Deadwood unique, even among its fellow works of drama on HBO. For
one thing, there is the amount of profanity. This was nothing new to HBO dramas
– the level of obscenities on The Sopranos
were part of what had drawn critics and viewers to the series in the first
place, and The Wire used it so well
that one of the great scenes in television history was basically three and a
half minutes of Bunk and McNulty just using variations on the F-word to
reconstruct a murder. What forced to Milch to explain to critics who screened
the pilot was the fact that people in the 19th century were using
the same kind of obscenities that you heard gangsters and drug slingers use.
Even after he did so, there were still quite a few people (and I have to admit,
I was one of them) who just didn’t believe him. However, I’ve since seen
documentation of coarse remarks that were forbidden to be use to shout at
umpires and baseball players in roughly the same time period. And considering
that most of those fans were from the so-called ‘genteel class’, I have
absolutely no difficulty believing that miners and prostitutes used that kind
of language.
But the fact is I mostly didn’t care. Because
the mix of obscenity and Milch’s tendency to alter the order of words for that
dialogue seemed to come together to form a kind of poetry that I’d never heard
on any television series before, and have yet to hear since. And in that sense,
I am inclined to agree that only Milch could’ve written this kind of show.
Even more astonishing was the way the
series was shot. Unlike The Wire and The Sopranos, Deadwood was filmed almost
entirely on a single set – the ranch where Gene Autry westerns were once
filmed, of all places. And most of the outdoor shots were full of filth and
muck. But unlike Oz, which was also
filmed largely on a single set, Deadwood never
seemed claustrophobic. It seemed a lot like we were at the beginnings of
something big. Even more astonishing was the time period of each season. Each
episode usually seemed to take place over the course of a single day: the
average season being over a period of weeks. It would seem hard to even
consider that there could be much character growth over that period, but there
would be quite a bit (at least among some of them).
And unlike far too many of the series even
in the Golden Age, Deadwood would be
one of the first fully realize the level of fully developed female characters.
This is particularly remarkable when even Milch admitted that he didn’t
‘understand women’. But few who saw Robin Weigert’s portrayal of Calamity Jane
will ever forget it, and most of the other women, though fictionalized, were
just as fascinating, particularly in the portrayal of prostitutes, played by
two exceptional actresses: Paula Malcolmson as Trixie, and Kim Dickens as
Joanie Stubbs. (We’ll get to the others in a bit.)
And all of this is even more astonishing
when you consider just how Deadwood was
being made in the first place. The
process for creating scripts had even fewer
boundaries than did for NYPD Blue. Milch
had fewer limits and no advertisers to answer to. There were scripts for the
first four episodes of Season 1, and after that, most of the series was written
on the fly, with the cast and crew not learning what they would be doing until
the day before. The writers would gather early in the morning, talking about
where they were going with the episode (a lot of the talk had nothing to do
with anything, one writer said) and out of those conversations would come
decisions on what scenes to write that day, with the cast to be informed the
next day. The actors would often be given scenes out of context with the rest
of the episode. You’d expect people to get nervous and angry about this, if not
downright revolt. But not even the HBO executives complained. As for the actors
– well, let Jim Beaver, who memorably portrayed Ellsworth sum it up:
“It’s one of the joys (and terrors) of
working for David Milch, having to use only the scene at hand as guide for who
you are and what your attitude is. Since scenes are often filmed out of order,
if you add the absence of complete scripts to the circumstance, there simply is
no strong guide for one’s sense of character beyond trusting the scene and the
fact that David will correct you if you’re on the wrong heading. It’s no wonder
that some actors might have difficulty with his process. But I thrilled in it.
It was like going over Niagara in a barrel
every morning, with all the fear intact, yet with a subdued voice in my
whispering ‘David won’t let you die.’”
And it worked. I didn’t know any of this
until years after I saw the series and knowing that much of this brilliant work
was basically improvisation – well, this puts Mike Leigh and Christopher Guest
to shame. Knowing this, it’s almost astonishing that Deadwood isn’t ranked as well as the two other series of the
troika. Part of it no doubt has to do with the third season, part of it that it
ended abruptly – but despite all that, it remains a work of art.
So, with that in mind, we’ll begin to look
at a Western unlike any other Western and a HBO drama unlike any HBO drama.
