Got 'Wood?

Now, I generally tend to miss good television when it’s on: and the reason for this is the strange duality at the heart of good television, which makes it so different from other visual arts such as cinema or theatre. 

Ooh - he said "strange duality" - the puff.

And don’t think I’m positioning myself here as some tweed clad authority on “good television” – mostly I watch garbage. I’m just saying I miss the good stuff, usually cos I’m catching up on the antics of some garbage like LOST. Which is a staple of mine, don’t get me wrong – I just don’t think it's truly good television like what Deadwood is.

It’s simple, really. When good television is actually on television, it’s presented in such a way as to basically ruin a decent viewing experience. Regardless of how hard a creative team works to establish dramatic atmosphere, it’s only a pick away from being shattered by a series of advertisements, bracketed between some principal sponsor interstitial, and generally wrecked. The better the television, the bigger the audience, the longer and more frequent the ad breaks. So good TV shoots itself in the foot, to draw on an appropriately cowboyish analogy.

Not only that but - with ad breask as milestones - you'll spot a formula quicker than anything. You *know* that the crew of the Enterprise will solve the lame problem after the last ad break. You *know* that that the CSI witness interviewed in the second segment will be the one who misdirects the investigation, and will have to be returned to at the end of the third. It's boring.

Can you imagine any other medium ruining itself like that? Pringles ads at the ballet? Breaks in movies about 16th century nuns to advertise Star Trek? All hail the TiVO, seriously.

And so it was with Deadwood: when it was on UK television, try as I might to make the leap in logic that would make antique dealing Lovejoy (Ian McShane) into a late 19th century bon vivant with a ruthless streak, I was never more than 10 minutes away from an ad for deep space nine.

And that’s the thing - deadwood is full of character actors, too. These are faces we know well from many places – you could say that lovejoy, on a daily basis interacts with the JP monroe from bladerunner and the headmaster from Ferris Bueller’s day off. And yes, sure, I know Jack from LOST was in party of five, yes yes, but this is different. It takes a lot to believe that people are in the 1880s, it’s not an easy task to accomplish.

Don’t get me wrong, they do it in spades and I have grown to love the show – but it is a delicate piece and needs your full attention. Now that I’ve seen it I really don’t think it would ever suffer ad breaks gladly. 

But enough preamble: Deadwood is truly great.

Not as great as many TV critics would have you believe, however: but that’s because many TV critics seem to have been buried under Big Brother and so think anything of any value at all is genius. Unfortunately as the english language shrinks and people refuse to curb hyperbolic tendencies, we have only three superlatives left to describe good TV:

i) better than the simpsons

ii) better than the sopranos

iii) shakespearian

And that, for me, does not work. Yes, the dialogue in Deadwood is awe inspiring. Yes the entire idea is worked as a character piece with its own strict rules, and so narrative is provided by soliloquies In the style of older drama. And yes, the subject matter is machhiavelian and the setting is some time ago. But this does NOT make shakespeare, nor should it: the comparison makes no real sense as well as being obviously a daft, easily pleased, over exuberant way of saying “good lord the dialogue is tremendously good”

But it is great. And foul. But welcome to deadwood: a gold rush town, resettled illegally in violation with the dakota sioux in 1888. Great and Foul are the adjectives of the day, as there is no law, because it is not inside the united states. There is no real civilisation except a parody of the social sensibilities of the time, no real medicine, and no respect for what would be referred to as human life today.

We are introduced to the town by the arrival of two of the main characters, Sol Starr and Seth Bullock, who plan to open a hardware store in what is presented to us as a pretty squalid encampment: in turn, their arrival introduces us to Al Schweringen, vicious rogue and proprietor of the town saloon and brothel, and the principal stakeholders in the encampment.

And what is basically set up is a keenly devised history of the inclusion of the settlement into the united states, largely due to a gold find among the prospectors of the town. 

And it’s all beautifully drawn in stories and sub stories. Indeed, the arrival and inclusion of new business interests to the illegal settlement strongly parallels the settlement itself within the larger context of the United States: simple, but clever. 

Driven largely by the interaction and interpredation of the stakeholders, the infighting and blackmail, murder and extortion come to shape both the town and the drama over the 36 episodes of the three series. Prospectors are murdered. Their widows seek advice from noble members of the community. The less noble members seek to steal her claim. Everyone seeks to maneuver to profit from the imminent development of the town. It’s the most basic of the cliches of the wild west, told so richly that the stories cook in their own juices. 

In otherwords, a lot of cowboy stuff happens. But this is the admirable feat that is Deadwood: working in a very terse fashion (each series covers just a couple of days) the script gives you a feeling of having cliches not just repositioned but also investigated and explained.

While Deadwood tells a story, it also seems to be making a comment on how stories develop. Because you see, Deadwood was a real town, and characters such as Wild Bill Hickock and Wyatt Earp did spend time there. Not only that but Sol Starr and Seth Bullock are real characters, as are Al Schweringen and indeed every character in the drama. This is not a true story; the times have been altered and events bent to suit the progression of the plot – but largely we are seeing an attempt to investigate how the legends of the wild west worked, and how they came about.

And there is something else Deadwood has for us, too: the english language. Yes, there’s a lot of swearing in Deadwood, and that’s a whole other reason why I enjoy the show. But it’s the grammar, the sheer colour of everyone’s speech that reminds us that even the most poorly educated once spoke with great flair, and used so much more allegory and scriptural reference just to explain what they were saying.

And this is where my unreserved praise for McShane comes in: such a role, in fairness, has probably never been on TV. We’re not talking about say, the realism of Tony Soprano, all ambiguity and suggestion. And we’re not talking about the theatre of say, the camp glory of a hannibal lecter style villiain, all flourish and moustache: we are talking both, in miraculously perfect measure. Al is unbelievably macabre and yet strangely three dimensional. High camp yet real cool. Completely and irrevocably fictitious yet highly believable: even when he speaks alone, in the aforementioned pseudo-shakespearian soliloquies, he is a real person to us.

And this alone is no mean feat: but stringing 36 episodes around it, as a character drama, is evern more stupendous. So I say get the fuck out from your computer and watch the fucking thing, as Al himself would say: what are you, cuntstruck?