TV Rewind: Deadwood
Episode 1 – “Deadwood”
By Eric Hughes
April 10, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
June of last year, I was browsing Netflix Instant and happened to notice that Twin Peaks, both seasons, was available to stream. The series, the thought of it and what it could be and be about, had long intrigued me. I knew it by name, I knew it to be a product of David Lynch, but beyond that I’d managed to avoid key plot points and, really, spoilers of any kind in the 20-some years it had been off the air.
Itching to begin watching a new show anyway, I approached David - Mumpower, not Lynch - with the idea to upload weekly recaps written by a beginner in probably the truest sense. I had never, up ‘til then, written so intentionally and formally about a television show.
He liked it, especially the angle of watching older television via online streaming. (David: “We as consumers control our own channels. You're programming ERIC TV right now and you're inviting the reader to join you on the trip. It’s fantastic.”)
For those who do and don’t know David, let me kindly say that the guy doesn’t monkey around. His blessing meant he really wanted me to run with it, and so I ran.
A few weeks later, I emailed him my thoughts about the pilot, and then 29 more columns - what would become TV Rewind - followed. Well, 30 more. I epilogued TV Rewind with a review of Twin Peaks’ theatrical prequel, Fire Walk With Me.
The column proved to be exhilarating, yes, but also quite frustrating. I realized soon enough that I wasn’t very good at reviewing a television show in, I guess, the traditional sense. I was uncomfortable about making bold predictions about plot directions and possible revelations, and didn’t want to summarize episodes piecemeal, but with adorning flair tossed in.
About midway through Twin Peaks, I stopped reviewing the show in what seemed the proper way, and made the thing more personal, echoing an emerging thing I’d noticed in my writing for BOP and other projects. I began writing about big picture stuff. I began writing about the things that I found interesting rather than the things that I thought were implied we find interesting. Make sense?
When I ran out of Twin Peaks episodes to review - in January - I thought the column done. But then I was again itching to watch a new series, and David - seconded by Kim - proposed Deadwood.
To me, what was interesting about his choice was that, again, I’d be watching a show I knew by name, but knew little to nothing about. And so I decided that, yes, at a manageable 36 episodes, I would be reviewing Deadwood.
That brings me - and in a sense, us - to here: the beginning of a second session of TV Rewind.
That four men died - and, come to think, a family of four, too - in just the pilot has me thinking the show will be as physically brutal as it is profane. The first of its eight kills happens in the opening minutes - a failed hanging, and then death by mighty neck break bamboozling - and I was like: “OK. So this is how Deadwood’s gonna be.”
Timothy Olyphant’s character, Marshal Seth Bullock, is a curious one, and I don’t know he would have killed that guy, accused of stealing a horse, had the rash decision to hang him publicly not been brought to his feet by the heat of peeved townies. In fact, the apprehended man attempts to strike a deal with Seth - you and me head together to the lawless Deadwood; I secure you monies on the way through easy thievery, and you, in return, leave me be - and I swear Seth would’ve mulled it more had his concentration not been broken by his partner slamming his way inside.
And yet, what I find interesting about the thing is I don’t think Seth was interested in his return on investment. I do think Seth moral and centered, and I do think he believes that individual character can be influenced and altered. In that sense he’s trusting, and the reward for Seth in the deal would not have been the purse, but to let go not an innocent man, but a man who probably would never have had another run-in with Seth.
In Seth’s head, a man shouldn’t die for allegedly stealing a horse. But as a supervisor of authority, as the town’s commanding constable, Seth must see that the man’s put to death because that’s what the townies expect ought to happen.
Perhaps such senseless barbarianism is the reason Seth wants to reinvent himself in Deadwood. I mean, I can’t imagine he truly decided to quit playing marshal and pack up and move from Montana to the Dakota Territory, so he could make a killing on hip boots.
As we see in the pilot, upon reaching Deadwood Seth can’t put to bed his desires to seek social justice, at least not when it seems right. And that’s why by the end of the episode, he’s murdering a dude with Wild Bill Hickok. The dude, in their eyes, staged the murder of nearly an entire family. He hadn’t, as he had told them, merely witnessed it.
Slaughtering a family and stealing a horse are, obviously, vastly different crimes. And yet, at that time, at least to what Seth had grown accustomed, they both meant death to the accused.
So how about that cast? Hot damn, I can’t get over how much of a who’s who that pilot was for me. I don’t feel I watch all that much television, and yet I had a steady “I know that face, and I know that face” thing happening.
A handful of actors - Dayton Callie and Paula Malcomson for sure; perhaps I’ll discover a few more - later appeared on the still active Sons of Anarchy. Dexter vet Keith Carradine is the aforementioned Wild Bill, a Jack Sparrow type in hair/bandana-situation, but really a cold and reserved, ankle-biting rat. Nothing like Agent Lundy. There’s Timothy Olyphant, as I said, and Molly Parker who recurred on Six Feet Under, and of course Ian McShane.
Gosh, McShane’s Al Swearengen is a piece of work. The brand of guy who’s your friend until he’s your enemy. You cross him just enough and he’ll literally have you killed. In the pilot, he has a friend of his fatally stab another guy in the chest for, you know, nearly compromising a con game he’d set up to play on a traveling business man from New York.
If Swearengen seems at all fair, it’s an act. I don’t know that he’d ever commit to anything that didn’t benefit his interests. He’s obsessively worried, whether outwardly shown or not, about his business and his image. He even carries out steep measures - free rounds on the house; half-price sex with his prostitutes - to laboriously quell the anxiety in his beer and smut hall brought on by the guy who “witnessed” a massacre.
He’s this way, I think, for being the big fish in a small pond. He owns the business everybody knows, and wants to stake claim in. He protects his assets through sheer intimidation. Kind of representative, in a way, of this country. The kicker is his character’s a foreign-born Brit of Manchester.
That Wild Bill’s return to Deadwood seems unsettling to Swearengen is of little surprise to me. Wild Bill embodies a threat to the Swearengen establishment, the Swearengen machine.
That Bill and Seth became such fast friends - I mean, they did shoot and kill a man at the same time - makes me anxious myself about the possible implications.