Deadwood

[apocrypha]

Surprised there isn't a thread for this already, and yes I searched 

Just finished watching the first season of this, borrowed from a friend. 3 season box set is on the "to purchase" list for December, no question.

Been very, very impressed with season 1. Superb production, cracking dialogue, excellent acting and just beautifully done scenery and costuming etc. Ian McShane and Brad Dourif have been especially intense and convincing - best performances I've ever seen from them.

Based on just season 1 I'd rank this up with The Wire to be honest and I'm practically foaming at the mouth for the rest of it. If I was capable of waiting that long I'd get the BluRay release but I just can't hold out for it.

[Abagadro]

It is a great show but prepare to be left hanging at the end.

[Johny Cee]

Surprised there isn't a thread for this already, and yes I searched 

Just finished watching the first season of this, borrowed from a friend. 3 season box set is on the "to purchase" list for December, no question.

Been very, very impressed with season 1. Superb production, cracking dialogue, excellent acting and just beautifully done scenery and costuming etc. Ian McShane and Brad Dourif have been especially intense and convincing - best performances I've ever seen from them.

Based on just season 1 I'd rank this up with The Wire to be honest and I'm practically foaming at the mouth for the rest of it. If I was capable of waiting that long I'd get the BluRay release but I just can't hold out for it.

The old "Television Thread" we discussed Deadwood quite a bit.

Season 1 and 2 are great, and McShane steals scenes left and right in Season 2.  Fucking Woo!  Cocksucker! 

I wasn't such a fan of Season 3.

[HaemishM]

Season 3 would have been good in context with a season 4 or the movies they were supposed to do. As a series ender, it blew because it wasn't written to finish off the series, it was meant to bridge to the last season. I haven't heard anything about the movies in quite a while, so I'm assuming the whole fucking project is dead in the water.

Season 3 is awesome for Gerald McRaney if nothing else.

[MuffinMan]

I remember reading sometime last year that the sets were dismantled and the movies were pretty much dead in the water. It's been the only show that we've Netflix'd that I could sit and watch an entire disc without going nuts.

[apocrypha]

Sad to hear about Season 3 and stuff 

Still gonna get the box set though, as much as anything I would like to do my own tiny part of supporting TV of this quality.

[Amarr HM]

I was surprised there was no thread for this either (til now). I bought the box set of season 1  for my old man for Christmas last week & having a sneaky look at it and it's awesome stuff. McShane is class & so are most of the oher main cast Jeffrey Jones (Ferris Bueller's headmaster) is good as the comic relief, sooo have to get season 2 of this and Carnivale asap.

[Grimwell]

This was some fantastic television. It was worth the price of HBO even if you watched nothing else that they produced at the time. It did end a sad death, but it is definitely something that I think the F13 crew would enjoy to no end.

[sidereal]

Worst series finale ever.

[Abagadro]

I once had a grand theory about how the show was an allegory of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, but I've forgotten most of it.

Anyways, a pretty interesting recent post by a writer for the show on how it operated and why no 4th season.

[HaemishM]

Worst series finale ever.

Because it wasn't in anyway supposed to be a series finale.

[shiznitz]

Watched the first two eps this weekend and I wasn't grabbed. Maybe my expectations were too high. Maybe the bad guy saloon owner is too evil to be believeable. I also sure as hell didn't expect to see Mr Rooney from Ferris Bueller.

[Sky]

Probably my favorite tv series ever. Saw the full series DVD last night at B&N...for around $180. Holy sheepfuckers.

And the ending is one of the epic failures of the television medium.

[WayAbvPar]

Watched the first two eps this weekend and I wasn't grabbed. Maybe my expectations were too high. Maybe the bad guy saloon owner is too evil to be believeable. I also sure as hell didn't expect to see Mr Rooney from Ferris Bueller.

Al went from being creepy to probably my favorite character in the series, and one of my favs of all time. Between the writing and McShane's acting, he is a joy to watch.

[sidereal]

The kidney-stone arc is fantastic

[WayAbvPar]

"Requiem for a Gleet" was absolutely horrifying.

[Samwise]

Thread necro record?

I started this show many years ago, probably after reading this thread, wasn't grabbed, and put it on my mental pile of "I should try this again someday, maybe my head isn't in the right place right now."

Most of the way through S2 now.  As others have said, Al somehow goes from irredeemable evil creep to lovable bastard over the course of s1, and I think getting over that hump is key to finding the show's stickiness.

[Tale]

And then there's a movie. Which I haven't yet watched, and I should try that someday.

Edit: How does the show's use of colourful language come across today? I appreciated that it was a great representation of what those characters would have sounded like in comparison to the rest of society in those days, but it was groundbreaking in 2008 to have the "swear engine" run quite so freely on a TV show.

[Samwise]

All the "fuck"s and "cocksucker"s are like, whatever, they talk like that in cartoons these days.

The part that's more surprising is that there isn't a disclaimer before each episode about the show's depiction of historical racism and misogyny.

[HaemishM]

The movie was an ok sendoff. It had a few sad moments with some characters shuffling off this mortal coil but it wasn't as emotionally impacting as I had hoped it would be.

[Velorath]

I liked the "movie" although it was less of an actual movie and more of belated finale for a show that had ended somewhat abruptly. It provided needed closure and probably works better now that you can go back and rewatch it without the anticipation caused by a 13 years of waiting for some sort of ending.

[Samwise]

Going straight from s3 to the movie was very weird because I could tell that I was supposed to be experiencing nostalgia for characters I'd seen fifteen minutes ago.    Not having that sense of nostalgia I was mostly just distracted by all the contrivances in getting those characters back together (what happened to the doc's TB?  why is Aunt Lou here?) and the conveniences of quickly and halfassedly assembling bits of closure for various characters.

S3 in general felt like it was poorly planned.  Hearst was a great off-screen menace in s2 but having him as an on-screen antagonist was a profoundly bad choice and I recognized it as one as soon as it became apparent that he wasn't just passing through.  It doesn't make sense for that kind of guy to get that up close and personal, and once you've written him that way, it doesn't make sense that he doesn't end up feeding the pigs (of course having the name of a significant historical figure who definitely didn't die in Deadwood gives him plot armor).  The theater troupe was just bizarre, as much as I love Brian Cox; it felt like they were meant to have been there all along as a running comic relief B-plot, and the show was bent over backwards trying to "more potatoes, Uncle Tusky?" them into that role belatedly, maybe with the idea that in future seasons their presence would feel more natural?

That said, I think I'm glad I stuck it out to the end, but I'm more glad I was forewarned by others that it'd be a disappointment.  

[HaemishM]

Season 3 was written to be a season 3, with season 4 to come along after it. It felt half-assed and poorly planned because it wasn't meant to be a conclusion. They didn't find out they were canceled until after the season had started airing.

[Samwise]

Even given infinite time, it's just hard to see what they'd have done with Hearst that would feel satisfying, because in real life we already know that Hearst leaves Deadwood unscathed -- so was season 4 going to be him just slowly grinding all our favorite characters under his heel while they fume impotently?  Focusing instead on his proxies (like Wolcott) gives you bad guys that you can get us to root against and then gleefully hang them from balconies without upsetting the historians too much.

The little bit of comeuppance he got in the movie was obviously trying to give the audience some sense of satisfaction, but it felt both totally unearned (there was no intricate trap laid by Al or stunning betrayal by Farnum) and also completely insufficient to how much time they'd spent getting us to root for his demise.

[Johny Cee]

Going straight from s3 to the movie was very weird because I could tell that I was supposed to be experiencing nostalgia for characters I'd seen fifteen minutes ago.    Not having that sense of nostalgia I was mostly just distracted by all the contrivances in getting those characters back together (what happened to the doc's TB?  why is Aunt Lou here?) and the conveniences of quickly and halfassedly assembling bits of closure for various characters.

S3 in general felt like it was poorly planned.  Hearst was a great off-screen menace in s2 but having him as an on-screen antagonist was a profoundly bad choice and I recognized it as one as soon as it became apparent that he wasn't just passing through.  It doesn't make sense for that kind of guy to get that up close and personal, and once you've written him that way, it doesn't make sense that he doesn't end up feeding the pigs (of course having the name of a significant historical figure who definitely didn't die in Deadwood gives him plot armor).  The theater troupe was just bizarre, as much as I love Brian Cox; it felt like they were meant to have been there all along as a running comic relief B-plot, and the show was bent over backwards trying to "more potatoes, Uncle Tusky?" them into that role belatedly, maybe with the idea that in future seasons their presence would feel more natural?

That said, I think I'm glad I stuck it out to the end, but I'm more glad I was forewarned by others that it'd be a disappointment.  

Yep.

S3 was just all around pretty uninteresting, with a bunch of bad choices for plot lines.  I'm trying to remember....  anything with the theatre people was just a write off.  Was Calamity Jane slowly self-destructing from alcoholism still, while she was figuring out if she wanted to be romantically involved with Jeannie Stubbs?  Even Cy Tollivar was less interesting.

There was alot of trying to make what were good secondary characters/sidekicks be primary characters once their purpose in the story was resolved, and mostly it didn't work.  Even some great characters had so little to do...  Brad Dourif was just dying of consumption for most of the season, right?  Bullock was kind of there, kind of not as the whole "surprise you have a family!" thing was just not what we cared to see Bullock doing.  I don't remember anything Sol did post shacking up with Trixie? 

Was Al like the only saving grace?

Season 3 was written to be a season 3, with season 4 to come along after it. It felt half-assed and poorly planned because it wasn't meant to be a conclusion. They didn't find out they were canceled until after the season had started airing.

No.  Something needs to stand on its own.  It doesn't matter how great a (potential) season 4 would be if season 3 just didn't work...  and it just didn't work at all.  Many of my favorite pieces of media drew me in somewhere in the middle when I accidentally gave it a chance.  If you need to slog through a bunch of bullshit to get to the "good stuff", then I'd say you are perfectly in the right dropping the series.

Also, they weren't cancelled cancelled....  HBO offered a limited 4th season to close out the show (6-8 episodes instead of 12) and Milch didn't go for it.


____________________________________________

Also, also also:

I just realized that I have been confusing Tracey Walter (Bob the Goon from Batman, Repo Man, a million other things) with William Sanderson (EB Farnum, JF Sebastion, Larry from Newhart, a million other things).  Fuck, my life feels like a lie!

[HaemishM]

I do agree, the season should have stood on its own. It certainly didn't feel like it had an arc or a finale, it just... ended. No real resolution on much of anything, no big conflict (I think that happened earlier in the season with Hurst's bodyguard getting ganked in the street). I remember someone getting stabbed but not much beyond that. Even the stabbing didn't feel very cliffhanger-like. Milch had gotten involved with his surfer dude show and I suppose he thought he'd have time to resolve everything, right up until he didn't.

[Samwise]

Focusing instead on his proxies (like Wolcott) gives you bad guys that you can get us to root against and then gleefully hang them from balconies without upsetting the historians too much.

So I just caught up on Spartacus (I'd had a hard time continuing it right after Whitfield died, just felt too weird having someone else in the title role) and as soon as Crassus came on screen I thought "aha, these writers are smart enough to succeed where Deadwood failed" and I thought they did a great job with it even though I saw the turns from miles off.  Crassus was set up as just likeable enough that having him survive, as required by history, wouldn't leave a sour taste.  Once his son started to get set up as an asshole I thought "I bet this kid is fictional and they're setting him up to be the target of our hatred so they can kill him in a satisfying way" and...  .

The ONE trick they missed was having someone make a prophetic crack at Caesar about the Ides of March and/or being stabbed in the back, for him to laugh off while we laugh at his expense.