Deadwood
Cast & Key People
Our Review
HBO let David Milch write like David Milch, and television has been chasing the high ever since. Deadwood ran only three seasons, from 2004 to 2006, and it is still the yardstick for what a Western can be when the genre drops the white hats for good. A gold-strike camp on stolen Sioux land, no law, no sheriff worth the badge, and a town inventing itself in real time through greed, cholera and murder.
Timothy Olyphant plays Seth Bullock, the lawman the town forces onto itself, but the real gravitational center is Ian McShane’s Al Swearengen, the saloon owner and killer who runs the place like a labor union with an axe. The dialogue is the reason people memorize this show: Shakespearean insult-comb, profane poetry, sentences you need to hear twice to catch how good they are. McShane won a Golden Globe and every scene he’s in belongs in a museum.
It is work. Milch does not summarize, episodes have titles like “Something Rich and Strange,” and if you bounce off it in the first three episodes you are normal. Push past them. Season 2 is one of the best seasons of television ever made (a 96% Rotten Tomatoes score, and the critics were generous to undersell it).
HBO finished the story in a 2019 movie, which is rarer and better than it sounds. Watch Deadwood, then watch the movie, then read a Milch biography. Our score: 9/10.
