I recently binged through Deadwood’s three seasons and its follow-up movie in pretty quick succession, which left me with lots of thoughts and observations about the show.
First, the biggest thing: Deadwood the TV show holds up better than ever. In fact, it’s magnificent. While I’ve always loved it, I recall getting slightly hung up by its by design ornate and nearly Shakespearean take on Western dialogue – delivered with a veritable armada of swearwords, the one that has the word “sucker” embedded in it most of all – from time to time.
No longer. Diving into 36 episodes of life and times in a Dakota territories mining camp circa the 1870s felt like mesmerizing immersion into a world that I didn’t want to leave.
The wonderful thing about rewatching great TV shows and movies is that you can focus on specific things if you like. For example, with Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, sometimes I’ll pay particular attention to how drenched in period pop culture it is, while other times I might think more closely about how it plays with history and our expectations at the same time.
Time and place
In taking in the entire series rather quickly, I was blown away by how much of a main character Deadwood the town – the “camp” as it’s called by every character – the location is to the story.
Not only do we see Deadwood evolve and literally grow over three seasons, but we see it as a representation of nascent civilization emerging in the lawless wild reaches of the American west.
Al Swearengen
Which brings us to Al Swearengen, one of the most intriguing and beguiling characters ever to grace television. I couldn’t take my eyes off of Ian McShane during my rewatch, and was consistently rewarded by how surprising – unnerving at times, hilarious at others – he was at every turn.
One of the things that makes Swearengen so compelling is that he’s a natural gangster-meets-businessman who innately understands that his relative power and position within the Deadwood community is both limited and constantly under threat.
Connecting the dots with Deadwood as a show about time and place, the Deadwood camp (and by definition Swearengen and his crew at The Gem) is constantly beset by larger forces who could sweep in and wipe the chessboard clean at any time if it behooved them enough: Yankton, the Pinkertons, George Hearst (Gerald McRaney), and the United States government itself.
The very first time I saw Deadwood, I was a little surprised that Swearengen saw an initial upside in backing Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant) as the camp’s sheriff (and first law enforcement official), but in seeing the bigger picture – as Al surely did – it makes perfect sense.
And similarly, while at first it’s easy to get caught up in Swearengen’s occasional forays into gruesome violence, when you zoom out you see him as a shrewd behind-the-scenes political operator, orchestrating factions ranging from Mr. Wu (Keone Young) and the Chinese immigrants in camp to Merrick (Jeffrey Jones) and Blazanov (Pasha D. Lychnikoff), who in essence control the camp’s communications via its sole newspaper and, later, telegraph.
Deadwood the movie
I recall enjoying Deadwood the movie well enough when it was released on HBO in 2019. More than anything, it was a joy to have essentially the full cast back in our lives for one more round of late 1800s western adventure.
In revisiting it after blasting through Deadwood the TV show’s brilliant three seasons, I must admit that the follow-up movie doesn’t hold up nearly as well.
While ostensibly the story catches us up with what’s happening at the moment that Deadwood joins the Union as part of South Dakota becoming a new U.S. state, it also seeks to resolve the story of George Hearst, the Big Bad from Season 3.
In so doing, the movie does feel like a compressed rehash of Season 3 in some ways: Hearst shows up (now a U.S. Senator representing California) wanting yet more land for his ever-bourgeoning mining empire, another beloved character (Charlie Utter, played by Dayton Callie) gets killed off in the process, with Bullock, Swearengen, and crew caught up in untangling the mess and contending with powerful outside forces.
While Deadwood the movie doesn’t necessarily harm the legacy of the TV show, it doesn’t add very much to it.
See where Deadwood placed in Pop Thruster’s best 100 TV shows ever.