Dark, violent and confronting, this HBO series stands the test of time

Deadwood ★★★★½

With The Wire and The Sopranos at the peak of their respective runs, in 2004 HBO commissioned David Milch to make the western Deadwood. Previously a writer and producer on Hill Street Blues and co-creator of NYPD Blue, Milch was not your typical TV showrunner. An English literature scholar and academic who found his way into writing for TV, he was also a lifelong gambler with addiction and mental health issues.

Ian McShane as saloon owner Al Swearengen in Deadwood.

As Ted Mann, a writer who worked with Milch throughout his career, puts it: “I loved working with David, not only because he was a line-level genius, but because of his insight into the crooked workings of humanity, which he understood fully, with love.”

Insights into the crooked workings of humanity are evident in Milch’s masterwork Deadwood, a western set in the backwaters of South Dakota in the 1870s. Both the real and fictional Deadwood were illegal camps that sprang up overnight to cope with the influx of prospectors when gold was discovered in the surrounding hills. It was a lawless frontier town on Sioux territory that would only later be annexed by the US government.

The main goings-on in this mud-soaked camp involved prospecting, drinking, opium, prostitution and outbreaks of smallpox. Eventually, however, across Deadwood’s three seasons a semblance of order and civilisation emerges, along with electricity and a telegraph linked to the wider world.

At the apex of Deadwood’s human food chain is bar-owner and pimp Al Swearengen (Ian McShane), a wild, primal beast of a man whose combination of brutishness, business wiles and cunning makes him the kingpin of the town’s economy and the unfolding drama.

Keith Carradine (left) as Wild Bill Hickok and Timothy Olyphant as Sheriff Seth Bullock in Deadwood.Credit: Alamy

Swearengen is nearly always the smartest man in the room, surrounding himself with expendable goons and unwitting pawns. Were this a conventional western, Sheriff Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant) would function as his nemesis. But in this telling of how the American west was civilised, Swearengen and Bullock have common interests, which are to resist the clutches of organised government and those with an even more ruthless bent than themselves, such as mining magnate George Hearst, who in season three tries to buy the town.

Taxes, men in suits telling ordinary people what they can and cannot do, greed and uncontrolled ambition and profits … The schisms of modern America are to be found in many of Deadwood’s dramatic threads.

As Swearengen, McShane brings to life one of the greatest of all of HBO’s “difficult men”. (The role was originally intended for Ed O’Neill, which is all but impossible to imagine in the face of McShane’s magnetic performance and expletive-filled oratory dialogue.)

For the uninitiated, the first season of Deadwood can be especially confronting. It is dark and violent, the worst of its brutality meted out physically and verbally to the women working for Swearengen and for competing brothel owner Cy Tolliver (Powers Boothe).

But unlike other HBO shows that flaunt being outside the rules of network TV, there’s nothing titillating or attractive about sexual encounters here. And as progress comes to the streets of Deadwood, characters such as Trixie (Paula Malcomson), the widow Alma Garrett (Molly Parker), who has inherited one of the area’s richest gold deposits, and Calamity Jane (Robin Weigert) emerge as richly complicated characters.

Being a period drama, Deadwood doesn’t suffer the curse of looking dated in the way many other TV shows tend to. Milch’s unsentimental take on America’s foundation myths has only become more relevant. Deadwood was abruptly cancelled at the end of its third season. It starts in mud and filth, but by the end the show was only starting to mine its gold seams.

Deadwood is now streaming on 7Plus.

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