Word: deadwood
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Milch says he set out not to write a western but to explore a society just starting to form its laws. He first pitched to HBO a series about cops in Rome during Nero's reign. After that project fizzled, he started reading about Deadwood, a town that sprang up when reports of a gold strike were hyped to justify expansion into Indian territory. "It was like time-lapse photography," he says. "Two months before [Deadwood begins], there was nothing. Two years later, they had telephones, before San Francisco did." The settlement had no laws, purposely. "It was a primordial...
...starters, by killing one another. In this and other surface ways, Deadwood is like many westerns. There's a bad guy, saloon owner Al Swearengen (Ian McShane), who lives large by relieving the locals of their gold nuggets and having his thugs plant a bowie knife in anyone who gets in his way. But he is threatened when--yes--strangers ride into town. Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant) is a former marshal with plans to open a hardware store. He's less a good guy than a control freak. In his last act as marshal, he hangs a horse thief without...
...Deadwood HBO-izes this material, though, not just in its profanity but in its moral ambiguity and social criticism. The show is like McCabe for more reasons than that it involves whorehouses and business conflicts. Like the '70s movies of Altman, Martin Scorsese, Roman Polanski, Francis Ford Coppola and others, HBO's dramas rework popcorny genre formats (the cop drama, the Mob flick) with dark, even cynical themes: that institutions are corrupt, that people and systems and families will screw you over, that heroes are never entirely heroic or villains alone in their villainy. Deadwood wants to show not just...
...Some of Deadwood's strongest insights are about the symbiosis between a racist society and the groups it despises. Take the camp's Chinese cook Wu (Keone Young), who is the butt of slant-eye jokes but has an indispensable role. When someone wants to keep a murder quiet, the corpse is fed--despite the cook's silent disgust--to Wu's pigs. (Which, yes, the townsfolk eat.) Even more essential are the Indians or, as they are dehumanizingly and incessantly called, "the godless heathen c__ksucker Sioux." Although it's two weeks after Custer's massacre at Little Bighorn...
...writer puts both intellect and experience to good use, especially in Deadwood's dialogue, which is vulgar but well crafted, even oddly formal. ("If you're going to murder me, I'd appreciate a quick dying. And not getting et by the pigs. In case there is resurrection of the flesh.") As with NYPD Blue's mannered police slanguage--or, for that matter, iambic pentameter--no human speaks this way. But the writing does what good dialogue should, which is firmly establish its own world and its own logic...