Deadwood's Back, and More Accessible
Western Docudrama Now Available to Those Who Couldn't Afford HBO
Jun 24, 2009
Deadwood was cancelled after its third season in 2006. Internet rumors at the time reported that many devotees of the show took axes and shotguns to their then-useless TVs.
But Deadwood is rolling again, and yeah, it's a rerun of the sadly cut short series that didn't get funded for a fourth installment, but now fans can relive it on DirecTV's 101 Network, a free channel to all subscribers -- even if one can only afford little more than a few golf channels, stiff Japanese cartoons or the gratuitous evangelical plate-passing infomercials . The 101 Network is the same channel that so charitably provides desperate channel surfers with Trailer Park Boys, another series that gives the serious TV watcher a reason to live.
The Way it Really Was
Created and produced by David Milch, Deadwood has been acclaimed as the most historically accurate and detailed western film series ever made. The weekly storyline is based on real characters and events that occurred in the gold-mining camp of the Dakota region in the 1870s, right after the U.S. government broke its treaty with the Lakota Sioux over the sacred Black Hills, which resulted in Custer's inglorious Last Stand. The plot lines are startling believable, as are the characters: saucy abused whores, shiftless cons, greedy claimjumpers, hardworking Chinese, neurotic gamblers, cadaver-nibbling hogs -- all pickled in laudulum, opium and rot-gut whisky. The casting is superb, producing believable portrayals of Calamity Jane (Robin Weigert), Sheriff Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant) and Wild Bill Hickok (Keith Caradine). The dialogue is mesmerizing and authentically crafted in the dicotomous idiom of the time: a hybrid of Victorian propriety mixed with vicious Wild West profanity -- all couched in a fog of Shakespearean wit and introspect.
An uninitiated observer of this series might find a few of the main characters a bit unsavory -- at first. For example, Al Swearegen (played by veteran British actor Ian McShane), owner of the Gem Saloon, theater, gambling house and brothel, may appear initially as a murderous psychopathic brute. But give it three or four episodes. The fella grows on you. Indeed, the viewer will soon identify with his woes, his ingenious albeit lethal solutions, and, as he so aptly describes his burdens, "The bags of shit left so incompetently in my path."
CheaperThan Psychotherapy ... or Paying for Past-Life Regressions!
Deadwood gives the anti-social, depressed and salty-mouthed connoisseurs of couch potatoism, those modern time outcasts who long to have been born in the 1800s of the Wild West, a brief escapism from Jon & Kate Makes Eight, or how about Entertainment Tonight with the latest on Octomom? After watching an episode of Deadwood, one may well feel as if their entire life has been flushed down a public toilet for watching just one useless, uninformative, eye-glazing installment of a daytime soap opera serial. Never again!
Deadwood has earned 22 Emmy Award nominations, won eight of them, and also won a Golden Globe Award. Watch on DirecTV Channel 239 (the 101 Network) every Sunday evening at 9 pm ET/PT. For more information on the show, check out HBO.
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