Deadwood

The Deadwood website at HBO.com is better than most of their show sites -- some meaty, if short, interviews, historical trivia, etc. Maybe there's just more to say about this show.

The thought of forty eight more episodes of Deadwood causes me to drool uncontrollably.

And one thing it shares with The Wire is that it takes politics seriously -- not as abstract talking-head stuff, but as part of on-the-ground daily life.

however my main problem with show is--well, i have a few problems.

1) too much good-guy olyphant. i like the actor when he goes roguish but i don't really like watching him as bullock (buttock? what is his character's name?)

2) while i'm a fan of the long-game, long-arc tv show (ie buffy, the wire esp., i claudius etc.) i feel like deadwood isn't really handling it that well. it puzzles me why a lot of the show's strands get so much time, almost like milch is stalling while he warms up the good stuff. it's all b-plot!

ok two problems.

x-post
yeah, nothing about it works quite as well as The Wire...but I'll take it in the absence of.

Of course, the worst is Catherine Zeta Jones and her terrible American accent in the T-Mobile ads. Horrible!

Welcome to fucking Deadwood! I'm glad it's back.

Also, in case anyone hasn't read it yet, Frank Rich had interesting things to say about the show this week:

Its linguistic gait befits its chapter of American history, the story of a gold-rush mining camp in the Dakota Territory of the late 1870's. "Deadwood" is the back story of a joke like "The Aristocrats" and of everything else that is joyously vulgar in American culture and that our new Puritans want to stamp out. It's the ur-text of Vegas and hip-hop and pulp fiction. It captures with Boschian relish what freedom, by turns cruel and comic and exhilarating, looked and sounded like at full throttle in frontier America before anyone got around to building churches or a government.

... It reminds us of who we are and where we came from, and that even indecency is part of an American's birthright. It also, if inadvertently, illuminates the most insidious underpinnings of today's decency police by further reminding us that the same people who want to stamp out entertainment like "Deadwood" also want to rewrite American history (and, when they can, the news) according to their dictates of moral and political correctness. They won't tolerate an honest account of the real Deadwood in a classroom or museum any more than they will its fictionalized representation on HBO.

Well I guess he died a couple years later :P

Isn’t that his son?

William Randolph is George's son, yeah.

I hastily searched Hearst and grabbed the wrong wiki, embarrassing!

no relation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABytIdNXKsg

Finally saw the movie, it was OK, kind of like an extended final episode of the show, albeit with not enough story to tell and too many people on hand through which to tell it. But I liked it fine.

Satisying enough.

"Any man worth the name knows the value of being unreachable." - Al Swearengen refusing a mobile phone

did we need flashback scenes?

As a middle-ager who watched the series ONCE, I would say yes as I pretty much forgot the entire Trixie-Jen-Hearst plotline.

Did they scale down Calamity Jane's makeup? Robin Weigert looked younger to me than she did during the series.

“What’s your feeling about a prosthetics gig? I know you’ve said you hate it,” it was my agent on the other end of the call.

My mind flashed back to my days of misery spent as the demon, Menlo, on the tv series, ANGEL. I had eagerly jumped at the chance...

1

— W. Earl Brown (@WEarlBrown) October 30, 2020

Nice.

aww

The best <3

While everybody is talking about Timothy Olyphant let it be known that he once asked me if I could play my best sad song ‘Olyphant’ for him

— Jason Isbell (@JasonIsbell) October 31, 2020

Tim said, “that sad song you wrote about me...”

Jason looked perplexed.

“...you know — ‘Olyphant’”

— W. Earl Brown (@WEarlBrown) October 31, 2020