Word: swearengen
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...Saloonkeeper Al Swearengen on HBO's Deadwood, Ian McShane once swindled a prospector, had him killed and then tried to fleece his widow. He has bribed officials and orchestrated or covered up numerous robberies and murders. And he very nearly killed an orphan girl for witnessing her family's massacre...
...greatest act of criminality was stealing the show. When Deadwood debuted last year, HBO did not promote Swearengen as the lead. The cast is an ensemble, and since when is the bad guy the star of a western? But as the season unfolded, the complex, amoral yet philosophical master of the Gem Saloon came to dominate the show with greasy, foulmouthed splendor...
Meanwhile, renowned shootist Wild Bill Hickok (Keith Carradine) has come to town with his retinue. (Most of the leading characters are based on real people.) To Swearengen, the formula is simple: former lawman + gunfighter = nascent police force, especially when the two stumble on a massacre-robbery perpetrated by "road agents" working for him. It seems, though, that Bullock just wants to kick his law habit and make a dollar, and Hickok, to drink and gamble his way into oblivion. "Hickok was acutely aware of his time having passed," says Carradine. "He had outlived his usefulness." Throw in abused prostitute Trixie...
...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, they don't appear, except as a constantly invoked and useful menace. Swearengen's road agents even scalp their victims to make it look like an Indian attack. You can't miss the post-9/11 point about the line between danger and exploitation. "An Indian was never seen in Deadwood alive," Milch says. "But if you keep people agitated, they'll drink...
...story can drag. But the acting is strong, especially Carradine's leonine, sad gunslinger, who asks his handlers, "Can you let me go to hell the way I want to?" Then there's Doc Cochran (Brad Dourif), the town's physician and its secret keeper--he inspects Swearengen's whores, covers up cases of smallpox, ignores evidence of murder under duress and hides a young girl who witnessed the road agents' massacre--and the pressure has him wound like a watch spring. The best moments in Deadwood happen at the margins, not in gunfights but in the pig pens...