Word: swearengen
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Dates: during 2004-2004
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...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...
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...