Deadwood

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.

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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.

(cf The Searchers, Red River, bonnie And Clyde, Heavens Gate)

the lack of white hats, heros, honour, etc--is perfect for the bush era.

It seems to me the perspective on Deadwood and The Wire too is kind of a left-libertarianism -- which is a weird place to be on the American political spectrum, because it's kind of the dominant voice of our mass entertainments, but it's almost totally unrepresented in actual political dialogue. And lacking political representation, it tends to run and hide whenever bipartisan bluenoses start yammering about values. I'm so sick of reading allegedly "liberal" columnists say things like, "Of course, our pop culture is an open sewer, and nobody can blame parents for wanting to protect their children..."

(Which is also another reason I like Frank Rich, because he's one of the only major liberal voices in the media who's sounding alarms about all this "indecency" stuff -- it's like he actually sees it for what it is. We need more pundits with arts backgrounds, maybe.)

I'll shut up now. But I do love this show.

Indeed.

What are y'all favorite lines from Deadwood? Put them here.

I like the little speech Swearengen gives about when he and Dan came and built Deadwood from scratch, "bucktooth fucking beavers slapping their tails in the water as if we were hired entertainment". Haha.

Well, he's good on Deadwood.