1x01 Deadwood

EDIT: [8.0/10] All I can say is mea culpa. When I watched this episode for the first time, I rated it a 6.0/10, and on rewatch, that seems mighty piddling for such a strong start.

I don’t want to slate my past self too badly. There are things about this pilot that don’t work on the first go-round. For one thing, it has what I would term a Game of Thrones problem, where there are scores of guys, each with the same complexion, each with some amount of facial hair, each with with some degree of ruddiness, who are pretty hard to tell apart in the early going. Series creator David Milch doesn't skimp on the characters in the show’s opening hour, and that can make it tricky to keep up.

At the same time, there were certain characterizations on my first watch that felt like clichés on the first watch. It’s easy for Bullock to seem like a generic man of law and order whose sense of justice is too strong to be snuffed out even in this lawless place. It’s for Wild Bill to seem like the standard old hand, there mostly to pass the torch to the new gunfighter. Hell, even Al Swearengen, the most original and distinctive character on this show, and one of television’s best, could seem a little too straightforwardly evil in this opening salvo.

But knowing more about these characters having watched the whole series, knowing where Milch intends to take them and having a better sense of their personalities, makes this a far more compelling and engaging experience, because Milch plants the seeds of so many details, so many shades of characterization that are subtle enough to miss (or at least subtle enough for me to miss) but which will blossom and bloom later.

Because in the shadow of the whole series, you can understand Bullock as not just a paint-by-numbers Western protagonist, but as someone who is almost pathologically obsessed with his sense of righteousness. Bullock is not a decent man in indecent times; he is someone who harbors a deep anger that he can’t control, for how things ought to be, that rears its ugly head whenever things are even slightly askew from his exacting standards.

I’ll admit my apostasy, that I’m still not necessarily a big fan of Timothy Olyphant’s performance, at least in the pilot. But I see now what I missed on my first viewing -- that there is a raw, barely-restrained intensity to the performance, one that I mistook for moral steadfastness, but now see as a sign of Bullock’s rage-filled pathology, that is focused in the right direction but nevertheless not exactly laudable or helpful.

Which is why it’s a good thing Sol Star is there. That’s another thing that didn’t necessarily process fully on my original watch -- how much this first episode takes time to establish not only the holy trinity of this first season -- Bullock, Hickok, and Swearengen -- but also establishes their seconds, in many ways keeping them in check.

For Sol, that means making sure that his partner doesn't goes off the rails, keeps his frustrations under control, and doesn't do anything too wild to get them in trouble on their first day in town, despite the many things that tempt Bullock to give in and smash some heads. Sol doesn't get much shading here, but you get the sense that he needed to take Bullock out of Montana to this unincorporated territory because Bullock needed to be away from the color of law. While many of the people who come to Deadwood do so because of the outrageous freedom a place with no laws represents, Bullock is there because a place without laws hopefully means none that he’ll feel compelled to enforce, in brutal, angry terms.

But Sol isn’t the only one keeping his partner and friend in check. Both Charlie Utter and Calamity Jane are clearing the decks for Wild Bill in town. Utter has more of Star’s role vis-a-vis his counterpart, trying to make sure that Bill still has a pot to piss in by the time he’s done, and trying to make plans and arrangements to support their little operation which the seemingly laid back Hickok doesn't concern him with.

And then there’s Jane, one of the most singular figures in a show not short on them. The enraptured look in her eyes when she gazes upon Will Bill, the curses and recriminations she offers to the patrons of the Gem Saloon, and the tender care and protection she offers to a rescued little girl from a family slain on the road, evoke this captivating woman of contradictions. She is vulgar as the street is muddy, vituperative and quick-to-anger with poor Charlie Utter and any the doctor and anyone who dares get on her bad side, but she is also capable of great love and affection. We see all this in miniature in Deadwood’s first hour, and we’ll see more of it as the series unspools.

Then there’s Bill himself, a mostly taciturn man who seems reserved in his early forays into the town, retiring from his celebrity and taking everything in stride, but also a bit resigned. There is the sense of a man going through the motions (something to which I might chalk up my initial impatience with the character) but who’s also a sleeping giant whom, when awoken, as by the need of the youngest daughter of a slaughtered family for help, is as formidable as his reputation might suggest.

That just leaves Al Swearengen and the comings and goings of the Gem to cement the oft-deadly, always duplicitous ecosystem that he presides over in Deadwood. So many people have come to Deadwood looking to find something the rest of the world can no longer offer. Bullock seems to want freedom from his lawman responsibilities. Wild Bill is escaping the warrants on his head. Dozens of others (including fancy pants heirs from back east) have come to prospect, and leave their troubles behind as they hope to hit it big in the gold rush.

But Swearengen isn’t trying to escape anything, he’s just found the place where he belongs, where he can be king and play the rest of this town like a fiddle while he tries to keep an eye on anyone who might strike a sour note.

I could go on for pages and pages about Ian McShane’s performance here, about how his dealings with the carpet bagging stuffed shirt, with the hilarious hotel proprietor E.B. Farnum, with his dutiful enforcer, with the unfortunate goon who meets his end after one of Al’s schemes, and most of all with the disquieting brutality and unsuspecting tenderness he shares with Trixie, tell you immediately what the tenor of this place is and what kind of show this is going to be. But there’s time for that in the course of the thirty-five more episodes Deadwood would use to explore Al Swearengen, the place he’s made for himself here, and the lengths he’s willing to go hold onto it.

I was wrong about the first episode of Deadwood. Every pilot has to essentially teach the viewer how to watch the show, particularly for series that depart from the normal modes and rhythms of television, and in that, perhaps, this episode failed me the first time around. Deadwood throws the audience in and expects them to keep up.

But having learned how to swim in those waters, the grand designs beneath the service are much more evident. The characters are deeper, the crackling dialogue is easier to follow, and the sense of place put forward in just that first hour seems all the more remarkable. It is a fine welcome to Deadwood, one that seems far less combative than on the first go.

A pilot's a pilot, and it has to do some typically nigh-intrinsically clunky things: introduce the characters, introduce the setting, and provide enough exposition about the premise of the show for the audience to follow along. There's a hell of a lot of table setting that goes on here. We get little vignettes to tell us who Bullock is, who Hickock is, who Swearingen is, and a host of other roughians populating Deadwood. Most of it is either trope-filled, replete with the standard issue halting speech patterns taken from the usual Westerns and other less-than-subtle indications that we're in the world of outlaws from flicks like Unforgiven, or it's using the standard HBO playbook, with sex and murder and curse words abound with a certain gratuity that makes them feel like a come on more than part of the substance of the show.

Swearingen makes the biggest impression, possibly because he's one of the few characters able to avoid the usual Cowboy patois and speak those curse words without them sounding like a gimmick. His role as the kingpin of this ecosystem is promising and the way he manipulates the town and knows everything that everyone's doing instantly marks him as unique figure. Ian McShane is electric in the role, and he's the biggest highlight of the episode.

Otherwise, we get Bullock as a pretty standard "I uphold the law and justice, even in the midst of lawless, unjust places and people. (The opening segment where he hangs the prisoner before skipping town sees to that even before he finds the family the miscreant ambushed later in the episode and executes him.) Hicock is the usual wildcard who still has a code. (It's hard not to think of his HBO stablemate Omar.) And we get a few others stragglers like Calamity Jane and Swearingen's hatchetman and Bullock's partner Star to fill out the world. There's a lot of good texture to Deadwood, South Dakota, a good sense that we're in Cowboyland with the usual cast of characters, but little of the story or setting immediately compelled me. Plenty of room to grow though.