HBO.
Decades back, TV was like the known world in the 18th Century — not so vast that one could not endeavor to grasp the whole thing with a little effort and patience. Now, with so many cable and streaming services extant and seemingly hundreds of TV shows with some kind of following and critical cache, I have given up trying to keep track. (Liking Fleabag, though!) I’m always impressed (sometimes, I must admit, in a negative sense) when intelligent people review so much TV that they clearly have to spend dozens of hours a week watching it. Maybe it’s because I’m old and still traumatized by the antique notion that anyone who watches that much TV has to be mentally deficient.
Back in the oughts I didn’t have cable and there were no streaming services, so I caught the big shows by getting friends to burn me DVDs or let me watch them at their apartment. So when I got into shows I did so peripatetically, time-hopping as episode availability demanded; later I filled in gaps with streaming. Some very good shows that I came to like in time (e.g. Mad Men, Breaking Bad) were not easy to absorb in that format, even when the acting and production might be great; sometimes it was because I started with eps that required a lot of series foreknowledge, but it was also at least in part that their visions were not singing to me.
I liked Deadwood from the beginning, though. There was the language, which really addressed the “Did people really talk like that” question not only in dialogue but also in the playing. Though the grammatically sound, often stately, and profanity-rich Deadwood argot is an invention, it sounds absolutely right coming for these people, for whom it seems violence and commerce are their actual first languages, and English is something they took up later to rise above their feral origins — in a practical sense, of course, they need it to effect higher orders of barter and the politics to which it leads; but also, at least for some, in hope of a better life and world. It’s not for nothing that the cracked, hyper-eloquent Reverend Smith got so much attention in the show and from the main characters; language is respected not only as a conduit to power but also as a light unto the infinite. As is often the case in ESL people, the Deadwood characters value language more than native speakers do, and their deliberate use of it is pleasing to the ear.
Another thing I appreciated was the generally cynical but not depraved attitude toward the hardness of life in Deadwood. Al Swearingen, for example, is a pimp and a murderer, brought up hard (I recall him telling a prostitute that his father once hit his head so hard he had a headache for three days) and not inclined to mercy — at one point he orders the murder of a little girl to prevent her from identifying him. But he is aware of and even respectful of other people's feelings, not on any personal account (at least not mostly) but because he’s a student of life, as many misanthropes are, and as is traditional with such philosophical-misanthropic characters, that sometimes makes his choices honorable despite himself. He knows, for example, that the development of the town and the territory will benefit him, but lines up against the powerful, deep-pocketed and most decidedly cynical and depraved developer Hearst in favor of local interests; he has practical reasons for it but, as Captain Renault observed to Rick in Casablanca, the winning side would have paid much better, and in South Dakota as well as in the world Hearst is likely to be the ultimate winner. The show seemed to know and say then that villainy can be very interesting but villains are only interesting up to a point, and then a man must show a richer vein.
So now we have the Deadwood movie to close up the loose ends left by the show's unsettled end in Season 3, set about a decade later. The thing is done so smoothly that it gives fan service a good name. I’ve seen series endings that made me feel almost as if I’d wasted my time watching the show at all, so I’m grateful to be left satisfied there's nothing more to be said.
There's no “Hard to believe so-and-so died in that fire X years ago” stuff; flashbacks are brief and judicious. Some characters turn up just long enough to show off their age makeup (or not — 13 years have passed since the last episode), reminding us these people have gone on living, even without us watching. There's some frisson and even sweetness in the unexpected meetings between Bullock and Alma and between Calamity Jane and Joanie Stubbs, though one notices telephones and telegraphs have been installed in Deadwood and suspects the unannounced arrivals make more dramatic than logical sense.
But the real closure comes [spoilers, now] from the at least temporary defeat of Hearst, who finds himself back in Bullock’s lockup but with harder charges to beat. No one believes that a Gilded Age U.S. Senator, even one with so gangland a style as Hearst, is going to prison on a local sheriff's warrant, but it beats the “You’ve done tipping your hat in this town" we got back in 2006, and shows the people we saw acting a certain way in the hot moment of threat revealed, even after ten years of thinking about it, to be just who and what they then seemed to be.
And if it seems sentimental for [spoilers, I said!] the ailing Swearingen to bequeath new mother and newly married Trixie the Gem, I am brought to the moment when Al asks the Doc if he may “be enlightened as to the passage of spirit in prospect for me,” and after they’ve discoursed on the nature of death for a bit (“I take us to be collections of cells, each aggregate a smaller, separate life inside us”), Al allows that “I’d not prolong the chewing up, doc, nor the being spat out” but that he would “not go out a cunt.” That seems a fair enough précis of Deadwood philosophy, and assuming it the mission of the movie we may count it a success.
I have not yet watched the movie as I'm waiting for Mrs. Derelict to return from Alaska so we can watch it together. We loved the original series, and I have little doubt the movie does the entire enterprise justice.
Roy, your spoilers are pretty mild, so I don't mind them in the slightest.
"at one point he orders the murder of a little girl to prevent her from identifying him." Gotta admit, if I'd been watching Deadwood, that's the point where I probably would have bailed out, no matter how well the show was made. It even affected the review for me to an extent--to me, much of the rest of it sounded like "Sure, Al Swearingen is a child murderer, but other than that he's a pretty decent guy." Hope the kid survived.