People, Places & Things: A Posthumous Lament for Deadwood

First, a disclaimer: HBO’s Deadwood has to be the most vulgar TV program I’ve ever watched, and in extolling its virtues I am in no way condoning said profanity.

That said, I think it’s one of the best written shows I’ve seen.

If you’ve never seen it, the historical drama was based on the South Dakota mining camp of Deadwood (site of the last big strike in the Gold Rush) and the real lives of its provincial power brokers, as well as the downtrodden men and women who did their bidding for good and evil.  The show’s creator and head writer David Milch (NYPD Blue) envisioned 4 seasons, with a time-line that would roughly parallel the real camp’s swagger toward civilization in the late 1800s.

Last fall, on a cross-country road trip, I passed through the tourist-trap town and stopped by the grave of Wild Bill Hickock (see picture at left), the infamous, misunderstood pistoleer who went to Deadwood seeking refuge from his own reputation, and ultimately met his demise, shot from behind by the coward Jack McCall.

The show’s portrayal of Hickock perfectly exemplifies how Milch’s Deadwood spared viewers another hackneyed western melodrama.

SPOILER ALERT: Almost as soon as Hickock rolls into town he is involuntarily drawn into the local mayhem, and we hardly have enough time to form an uneasy attachment before he is unceremoniously assassinated.

My first brush with the show left me spinning – confused, conflicted and unconvinced that this was a productive use of the daily time I allot for studying good film or TV.  But from word one it was different from anything else I’ve seen on television, in true HBO fashion.  It wasn’t long before I wanted more.

The program has an absolutely distinct dialect, roving between ornate Shakesperean prose and idle backwoods prattle.  Watching the first episode I got frustrated like someone learning a foreign language, who tries to translate every word into English instead of just taking it in.  This was off-putting at first, but after a couple of episodes I was hooked.

It’s an incredibly effective tactic that I find similar to the way Aaron Sorkin wrote dialogue for The West Wing.  While watching that show many viewers have to pay such close attention in order to follow the characters’ esoteric, machine gun dialogue that when we come up for air at the end of an episode we feel a sense of accomplishment followed by attachment and belonging.  When evoked in an audience these are addictive emotions that make and keep dedicated fans.

In the case of both shows, when I watch them it feels like reading poetry; in the moment I worry that huge chunks of meaning are lost on me, but I’ve learned I have to just let the words wash over me, and let my mind register what it will.  And register, it always does.

As I work to learn the craft of screenwriting I find myself wanting to study Deadwood scripts so as to learn what else makes the writing so good.

Here’s a sample from a scene that’s stayed with me, in which lead character Al Swearengen stands with his henchman Dan Dority on his roof deck above the Gem saloon, the unwitting town’s heart and soul, and together they watch workers raise telegraph poles in the distance:

 Al: Messages from invisible sources, what some people think of as progress.
 Dan: Well, ain't the heathens used smoke signals all through recorded history?
 Al:  How's that a (expletive) recommendation?
 Dan: Well, it seems to me like letters posted one person to another is just a
      slower version of the same idea.
 Al:  When's the last time you got a (expletive) letter from a stranger?
 Dan: Bad news about Pa.
 Al:  Bad news. Tries against our interests is our sole communications from
      strangers. So by all means let's plant poles all across the country,
      festoon the (expletive) with wires to hurry the sorry word and blinker our
      judgements of motive, huh?
 Dan: You've given it more thought than me.
 Al:  Ain't the state of things cloudy enough? Don't we face enough (expletive)
      imponderables?
 Dan: Well, by God, you give the word, Al, and them poles will be kindling.

Ian McShane as Al Swearengen - HBO photo

Al Swearengen is the town’s de facto despot and dealer of fate.  We’re introduced to him as a man with no cracks in his exoskeleton, no soul, even, but this doesn’t last.  Soon we’re allowed into his bedroom as he recounts his lonely, troubled past in nightly confessions to his whore du jour.

My first screenwriting professor told me in so many words, if you want to sell scripts, write great bad guys… actors live to play them.  Al Swearengen has got to be one of Hollywood’s best-written bad guys.  Milch and co. gave this uneducated character a vocabulary that is profane, yet profound.  Despite the evil he is capable of, we pity him and somehow wish him well.  That’s one of the reasons why it’s so hard to swallow the show’s final episode as “The End”.  History tells us how things ended in the real Deadwood (here’s the Wikipedia summary, for what it’s worth) so we can come up with a conclusion on our own, but it’s just not the same.  I feel cheated, robbed!

But here’s the thing, even the show’s mastermind looks down on that reaction.  In an article published not long after Deadwood’s abrupt cancellation Milch disdains the tidy ending as a tool people use pointlessly to try to organize their lives, that we’re lying to ourselves thinking we’re “entitled to a meaningful and coherent summarizing of something which never concludes.”

Nonetheless, when it came time to box those DVDs, Milch agreed to walk through the boarded-up Deadwood set at Melody Ranch in Santa Clarita, CA for a bonus feature in which he describes how he would have brought the show to its conclusion in one more season.

HBO has not taken down the show’s website, but neither does it contain any mention of Deadwood’s cancellation.  How fitting, considering fans had no inkling as they took in the final episode of season 3 that it would be the series’s last.

A letter from HBO lays out the network’s reasons for canceling the show, but it boils down to Deadwood’s lack of popularity and rising production costs going into its third, and ultimately final season.   Plans to make a Deadwood movie died likely sometime during pre-production, if the effort ever made it that far.

I have always struggled with endings in my career as a journalist.  Too often, too many reporters resort to the fail-safe OTWT (only time will tell), often prettily disguised by other words, but employed with the same eye-rolling effect on listeners.  I’ve wasted countless hours staring at blinking cursors, overwhelmed by the infinite number of ways to end a story.

I think the real problem is, we just don’t like good things to end.  I guess we should be glad they ever got started.