Deadwood Review

Milch wrote this in a deliberately artificial dialect, formal syntax carrying relentless obscenity, and the gamble is that within twenty minutes it stops sounding like an affectation and starts sounding like the only way these people could possibly speak. Ian McShane's Al Swearengen is the performance the show is built on, a man whose intelligence is entirely occupied with survival and who is permitted, very slowly, to become something like a founder.

The thesis underneath is genuinely unusual for a western. The camp is not civilized by a lawman, it is civilized by capital, and every arc traces the moment when violence becomes less profitable than agreement. Brad Dourif, Robin Weigert and Powers Boothe are all doing work that would anchor a lesser show. The photography is muddy and candlelit and exactly right. The third season is compromised by a cancellation nobody prepared for, so the Hearst confrontation resolves without the escalation it needed, and the later film is a coda rather than a conclusion. Unfinished, and still among the best written.