Deadwood

I grew up with television. My father couldn’t get enough of shows like “Maverick”, “Cheyenne”, “Have Gun, Will Travel”, and lesser westerns such as “Rawhide” (who knew Rowdy Yates would morph into one of Hollywood’s most watchable directors forty years later?) and “Rifleman”. Harry was never a big “Gunsmoke” or “Bonanza” fan, though. My father grew up in the 20s in eastern Montana, rode horses on the family ranch and had a dad who was a deputy sheriff. So he became a real connoisseur of serialized horse operas, and I watched what he watched.

Nowadays, the closest thing to a Western on TV is “The Real Housewives of Orange County”. Several years back, HBO aired four 13 episode seasons of “Deadwood”, which get some good buzz from critics before its premature demise (5 seasons were planned by the writers). I’m always amazed at how easy things are here in the twenty-first century. Netflix and DVD residuals have combined to make the “time-shifting” of VCRs seem quaint. I can decide to watch an entire series, after it’s been determined to have value. And I can take 4 years, 4 months, 4 weeks, or 4 days to watch it.

In the last ten years or so, an evolutionary step has been taken in the narrative forms seen on TV. In the 60’s, “Peyton Place” introduced the soap opera narratives to hour long serialized drama. Characters had arcs, and seasons had ongoing dramatic flow. In the 70’s, “Dallas” introduced the year-end cliffhanger – “Who killed JR?”. In the 80’s, “Hill Street Blues” brought intelligence and quality writing to the genre, allowing for something more than sketchy comic book characters portrayed by either wooden or scenery chewing “actors”.

The latest step appears to be the novelization of TV series. The best examples of this genre have been “The Wire”, “Battlestar Galactica”, “Lost”, “The Shield”, and the darling of the intelligentsia, “The Sopranos”. Each of these shows takes a world which most people never see, much less inhabit. Protagonists are neither stick figures, nor archetypes; they have multiple, conflicting motives, and don’t always make the best (or even good) decisions). Narrative thrust is complex, often involving several interlocking story lines, and eschews standard patterns.

All of these shows also present problems for a discerning viewer. They are either obsessively violent (Sopranos, Shield), or clearly fanciful (Battlestar, Lost). The best comparator is Dickens. He wrote long, complicated narratives which seemed to meander, and apparently were often made up as he went along. His characters, while seeming to be caricatures, were nonetheless complicated and memorable. They are not people you would ever hope to meet and spend time with, but you couldn’t stop thinking about them and what made them tick.

“Deadwood” is the latest novelized TV show I have adopted from Netflix. I am now half way through the second of four seasons. Deadwood is set in 1876, in the Black Hills, just before the defeat of Custer, and during the founding of the mining camp, Deadwood. This territory does not clearly belong to the United States (the geography is such that it may not have been included in the Louisiana Purchase), and is not yet (at the start of the series) included in the Dakota Territory. It snugs up near Wyoming and Montana, and is being carved from a narrow valley amidst the rich ore deposits found in this ancient forested low mountain outcrop, isolated from the Rockies to the South and West.

It is in many ways a land unto itself, and thus an opportunity for the writers to explore just what elements are needed for a nascent human community, what kinds of trouble that community can get into when no one is watching, and how it must dig itself out of any holes it creates.

The two most compelling aspects of this drama, for me, are the characters, and the background, or cultural context. In no particular order, the players include: Wild Bill Hickock. Although he dies (holding Aces and Eights) half way through the first season, he still exerts a pull over many of the townsfolk in the second season. His sidekick, Charley Utter, is a man fighting depression and inertia. His way out includes creating a freight company (little is made in town, much must be imported) and watching over Bill’s other sidekick, Calamity Jane (no one uses that adjective before her name in this show). Jane is a drunk, and both fearless and forlorn, having a past history of abuse as a young girl.

Riding, from Montana, into town the same day as Bill and his entourage are Seth Bullock and Sol Star. Bullock is leaving his job as Sheriff of a similar small town, and hopes to also leave violence behind him by opening a hardware store with Sol, a non-practicing Jew. They buy a corner lot from a local entrepreneur, Al Swearengen, who also owns a bar and whorehouse. Al is the self-appointed overseer of the town, and makes sure he knows everything that goes on out there. If anything crops up threatening to disrupt the free flow of money into his enterprises, he either engages the party as an ally, or seeks to outwit, out maneuver, or simply out those involved. Al’s favorite girl, Trixie, is sent as a spy to the hardware boys but ends up half falling for her assigned target, Sol Star.

Al employs Jewell to clean the blood and other fluids from the floor of his saloon. Jewell, played by disabled actress Geri Jewell, has cerebral palsy. She is clearly smarter than she looks, but, in 1876, no one will accept that. Her halting walk is improved by braces made by Doc Cochran, who also supplies laudanum to those in need, and sees to the health and safety of the town’s burgeoning female population. What this man is doing in Deadwood still escapes me. But he is a moral center in an otherwise lawless town, even through his corruption and misery. Al also employs two bag men, the wily Dan Dority, and the chronically mystified Johnny Burns.

Next door to Al’s Gem Saloon is the home of A.W. Merrick’s Deadwood Pioneer, the camp’s daily paper. A.W. is an earnest but broke newspaperman, who is constantly on the hunt for news, which often happens within earshot of his offices.

Down the street, Cy Tolliver (played by the elegantly malevolent Powers Boothe) has opened an upscale version of the Gem, with Ricky Jay serving in the first year as his chief croupier, and Joanie Stubbs as his right hand madam, who opens up her own place to disastrous consequences. Cy has his own sidekicks, Silas Adams and Con Stapleton.

Key among the more righteous women is Alma Garret. Addicted to opium, then cured by Joanie, she becomes pregnant by Seth Bullock (who at the time is married in absentia to his deceased brother’s wife Martha). All this while suffering the “accidental” death of her husband, who has come west from New York to play gold miner, and lucked into a high-producing claim. Alma, once she becomes a widow, successfully gains the backing of Wild Bill, then Bullock, and finally her foreman at the mine, Ellsworth. Seemingly fragile, she is clearly a survivor, and quite possibly the smartest (though not most experienced) person in the camp. Oh, and she is raising an orphaned Swedish girl, who family was killed by Indians outside of town.

The Court Jester is E.B. Farnum, who operates the only “legitimate” hotel and eatery in town. While appointed mayor by the conniving Al Swearengen, E.B. serves mainly to funnel news to Al, and fall over himself trying to create self-aggrandizing plots.

Of these characters, only Seth Bullock (played by a tightly wound, laconic Timothy Olyphant) wold be recognizable to students of standard TV fare. He is the righteous loner, bent on righting wrongs, and trying to keep to himself while raising a family. Think “Shane”, or “High Noon”. Of course, Al maneuvers Bullock into becoming the one thing Seth didn’t want to be, the sheriff. Bullock secretly relishes the job. We know he’s up to it, because at the very start of the series, he and Wild Bill, in typical buddy movie fashion, have gone out to capture the killers of the orphaned Swedish girl, and brought frontier justice (at the point of a gun) to him. But everyone else – the whores, the saloon keepers, the background townies – carries a wallop of “Whoa! I wasn’t expecting that!”

All of these people talk in an almost Shakespearean dialect, sounding as if they were reading a novel from the mid-nineteenth century. Their sentences are complex, with multiple clauses and ideas in each. When the most ornate among them (Swearengen, Tolliver, the Doctor, Alma Garrett, Merrick) let loose, they leave the lesser townsfolk mystified and tongue tied. One aspect all the men share, however, is an affinity for mixing, almost at random, variations on “fuck” quite liberally throughout their speech.

In addition to the characters and their dense dialogue, I am fascinated by the background action and context on the show. Verisimilitude is the name of the day. The show’s creators must have asked, “now how would they have done such-and-such in this camp in 1876?” Al Swearengen has to leave his one suit out on the balcony for a day after it is returned from the “cleaners”, to air out the petroleum fumes. Doc Cochran agonizes over two whole episodes about Al’s kidney/bladder stone, which has left the patient in a uremic, distended coma, and introduces urethral catheterization, and supra-pubic unanesthetized surgery to the small screen.

Race relations of the time appear, including a vivid tarring and feathering, and ghettoization not only of blacks and Indians, but also the newly arrived Chinese, late from the railroad’s rape of the plains. A “boneshaker” bicycle (tall front wheel) is raced down the boardwalk to the delight of the punters, only to play in a tragic accident the next episode. There must be no barber in town, as all the men have increasingly curly locks combed back under their hats. The women are boarded up in corsets and gowns tighter than windows in New Orleans before a hurricane. Men refer to women (unless they are paying for the privilege) exclusively as Mrs. or Miss, even man to wife.

The town itself is a mess, with stores in front of stores, pigs for coroners, hygiene non-existent, and plague (smallpox) quarantine tents set up in the middle of the main street.

After all this, the stories are almost an afterthought. In general, they are not universal stories (boy meets girl, bad guy terrorizes town, little man triumphs over big corporation) usually seen in Hollywood fare. rather, they flow directly from the context of the time.

Example: A big Montana mining company sends an agent into town. He insinuates himself into the graces of Cy Tolliver, spreads rumors through the paper and Swearengen, and starts buying up claims, to consolidate “workings” so that cheap Chinese labor can then be employed to extract the ore. Along the way, he induces a man to kill his brother, who doesn’t want to sell out, and he himself kills three ladies in Joanie’s new place, forcing her to send the other girls fleeing out of town under cover (literally) in the back of one of Charlie’s freight wagons. This business takes most of the second season to unfold. It is interspersed with Al’s bladder troubles, Bullock’s women troubles, and all the sidekicks’ peccadillos.

This is a show which deserves close attention, not fleeting awareness like some reality program. It is a deeply realized alternate reality, compelling and vastly entertaining.