The western, as everybody who doesn’t have HBO knows, is dead. Its moldy corpse was buried decades ago, when “Gunsmoke” finally went off the air and moviegoers tired of seeing squeaky clean cowboys falling from gunshots that failed to stain their shirts.
To be sure, Clint Eastwood did some nifty, against-the-grain things with the genre in “Unforgiven,” on the big screen, in 1992. But as far as television was concerned, there was no more room for westerns.
And then came “Deadwood,” proof that the only rule in television is there are no rules. In two seasons on HBO, the second of them culminating Sunday (8 p.m.), this series has made the concerns of cowboys, miners, sheriffs, saloon keepers and whores more relevant than another “CSI,” more real than “The Apprentice.”
Especially in the 12-episode second season, as creator David Milch (“NYPD Blue”) has turned the story from scene setting into a taut examination of civilization in its formative stages, it has become one of the greats, right up there with “The Wire” and “The Sopranos” of recent vintage.
Like both of those series, it takes a standard genre — cops for “The Wire,” organized crime for “Sopranos” — and puts all its cliches to a truth test. The result looks, smells and tastes like nothing you’ve ever seen, but also, ingeniously, is familiar enough to carry you through the edgy parts.
It’s probably closest, though, in spirit and ambition to a less-well-known HBO series, the brutal prison drama “Oz.” But by making its crucible of humanity — its testing ground for epic brutality and petty meanness, for looking into, as its chief villain likes to say, “our natures” — a Western town instead of a maximum-security prison, it seems a lot more accessible.
High praise
“Deadwood” may not be the cultural sensation “Sopranos” is — it’s been averaging about 6 million viewers per week in the several airings it gets on HBO and HBO2 — but it is already renewed for next year and has drawn much notice, most recently from the Peabody Awards. The awards, which aim to recognize the best of the electronic media, made “Deadwood” their only U.S. fictional series honored this year, citing the way it “twists the conventions of the western into an excruciating knot of history and imagined events.”
Deadwood, in what would become South Dakota, is the nexus for gold strikes in the Black Hills. The discoveries bring fortune seekers and their followers in businesses both reputable and otherwise. The saloon keeper Al Swearengen is the town’s darkest and most powerful force, a man of almost pure evil in the first season (and also a fellow given to mulling over human nature and finding it wanting).
But the town, which still calls itself a “camp,” recognizes that to protect its own interests it’s got to get organized. With help from a suddenly but uneasily politic Swearengen, it elects a sheriff, the violently righteous hardware man Seth Bullock, and a mayor, ineffectual hotelier E.B. Farnum. And, led by the unlikely alliance of Swearengen and Bullock, it spends much of Season 2 playing the Dakota and Montana Territories against each other for the town’s bejeweled hand in annexation.
Also stirring things up, trying to buy up discount mining claims while hiding his own tortured psyche, is a diabolical agent of the mining magnate George Hearst.
In Sunday’s finale, Hearst’s arrival in town and the wealthy Alma Garret’s planned marriage of necessity act as catalysts for the reactions that have been developing all season. Milch and company elegantly wrap up this season’s main stories, but they also open new wounds and leave several big questions for the next season.
If you don’t have HBO and know of “Deadwood,” you probably know it for its profanity, a reputation that’s both wholly deserved and a bit unfair. More than a streak, this show curses a blue swath, with lines of dialogue sometimes containing more curse words than regular ones. One enterprising Web site took to counting the F-words, calculating the show’s “FPM” rate and finding a high of 121 of them per 50-minute episode in the season’s sixth installment.
Series creator Milch claims profanity was a fact of frontier life, a way of asserting your virility without drawing a weapon. And a viewer can buy that up to a point, but there’s also a point where all the swearing simply becomes its own reason for being.
It’s hard for some viewers to take, to be sure, but for others, it’s as much a part of the setting as the scenes so densely populated with extras you forget you’re watching a TV show, the sets that don’t just have a fore and background but a seeming seven separate layers of activity.
This show goes for richness in every realm. There’s humor in the darkest moments and the most ominous characters, including the Dakotas’ chosen emissary. There’s a careful interweaving of the stories so that, as in society itself, every character’s fate is dependent in some way on every other’s.
And there’s actual dirt on the faces of its players, even the “good guys,” a palpable feeling of needing a bath. When Calamity Jane (Robin Weigert) took her bath last episode, it didn’t play as titillation but as humanization of this woman who’d been, since the death, last season, of her partner Wild Bill Hickock, a raging, darkly comic drunk. Even as she used vulgarities entering the water, it was a touching scene of baptism, of rebirth.
Language, cast soar
What’s most striking about the language, though, is the wild contrasts Milch and his crew — who include a very high count of five female writers (out of nine) — draw. A sentence loaded with curses is also constructed in a kind of elaborate Victorian English, journeying from the gutter to the rooftops and back again.
You can hear echoes of some of the deliberately stilted phrasing Milch would have Andy Sipowicz deliver on “NYPD Blue,” but the formality seems more natural in a 19th Century setting.
The cast is near-perfect. Much has been written about Ian McShane’s forceful performance as Swearengen, and it’s only deepened this year with the new demands on the character.
But credit the lesser players too. You can pick any of them in this densely populated story, but credit Powers Boothe’s combustible Cy Tolliver, the more upscale rival for Swearengen’s trade and for backstage control of the town; Molly Parker’s Alma Garret, the former opium addict turned into the town’s richest woman and the lover of the married sheriff; and especially Garret Dillahunt as Francis Wolcott, Hearst’s man, so well-groomed and intelligent for a Jack the Ripper type. (Dillahunt, incidentally, played Hickock’s killer in Season 1.)
Here, though, is the bad news. If you’re new to “Deadwood,” it probably makes no sense to just tune in Sunday’s finale and expect to get more than half of it. There’s too much that’s been happening.
Viewers who get HBO on Demand through their cable service have all the season’s episodes stacked up neatly, waiting there like firewood for long winter (or summer) evenings. Others can wait until the series shows up in the video stores, probably in a matter of months.
But one way or another, fans of serial narrative, the Western and just plain good storytelling will want to see this new entry into the TV pantheon.
Tribune television critic Steve Johnson is on a leave of absence through June. During that time, he will write periodically about media trends and issues.
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sajohnson@tribune.com
