How do you do an ending? In the case of Deadwood, hauled from the air in 2006, the answer was: you don’t.
For context, Deadwood was a series that arrived with high hopes in 2004. It was a revisionist western by an established TV master, David Milch, who had brought rare sophistication to the storytelling of Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue.
In retelling the story of the Wild West, and employing the freedoms granted by its broadcast on a cable network, Milch produced three series.
These generic comparisons aren’t an exact science, but there’s little wrong with the summary offered in The New Yorker by Milch’s screenwriting daughter Olivia. Milch, she said, writes “novels set like plays, and shot like movies, which play on television”. Nor is he a traditional three-act writer. Plot, to him, is how a character reacts.
Ideal, you might say, for TV’s golden age. But in 2004, even at HBO, a network that prized prestige more than ratings, Deadwood didn’t do enough. It wasn’t the new Sopranos, or even Six Feet Under.
The show was canned after the third series — an event that Milch termed an “abrupt rupture”. Certainly, the rupture was abrupt enough that he declined the offer to conclude the story with a couple of two-hour movies. After that, cult status ensued.
But now there is an ending. You’ll get no spoilers here, but the final moments of the drama are a worthy conclusion. They are given extra poignancy by the fact that as the show was being written Milch was beginning the slide into Alzheimer’s — but no special pleading is required on his behalf.
If it feels abrupt, but that is the nature of farewells. And, rather oddly, there has been no great effort to remind viewers of — or introduce them to — the complex character dramas that spooled out in the show’s original run.
Still, you can come to this with no prior knowledge. Accessibility is built in, and if the brutish realities of the frontier don’t seem quite as shocking as they did initially, that’s because Milch’s work has affected the ecology of television.
In fact, the plotting here is fairly straightforward. Brutal and corrupt Senator George Hearst (Gerald McRaney) is buying up land for his telephone poles. “We’ve no say as to the pace of modernity’s advance,” he says. His methods are dire, and the forces of decency are underpowered. (Since westerns are often current affairs in disguise, you may wish to bring your own metaphor-decoder.)
Meanwhile, the show’s hero — or, to be accurate, charismatic villain — Al Swearengen (Ian McShane) is unwell, and largely an observer of these shifting sands. “I ain’t got no time left for fancy dancin’,” he tells Trixie (Paula Malcomson). There is time for a few indignities, some medicine, and a few shots to numb Swearengen’s bewilderment, and the plot manages to include a shooting or two, a hanging, a wedding and a newborn baby.
But let’s not forget the language, even though most of it is unprintable here. It’s safe to say that Milch’s use of words is Shakespearean. As someone says when depriving Al of a drink: “It’s easier told than saddled and rode.”
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