DeadWood

[Jules]

Started watching it a week or so ago and have finished all three seasons. Very disappointed that there is not a fourth season. I feel like I've lost a family.

[BigFatTire]

Yeah, the person who cancelled it is a San Francisco c*cksu@ker...

[billmarq]

The series definitely needed one more season. I wonder... do you suppose the Hearst family exerted any influence to have the show cancelled?

Naw. That sort of thing just does not happen.

[Ire]

Definitely another season. I'm sure Hearst's family added pressure where they could. But it was still in the golden of HBO's series where they could say "no" with impunity.

[Scripted77]

Loved this show (I also watched it on DVD recently). Definite recommend for anyone that hasn't seen it.

[Xnod]

It was absolute murder that this show was cut. It really needed one more season to wrap things up... one of the biggest cockteases ever in the history of the universe.

[BeefMissile]

I enjoyed the first season. The writing, plots and acting were top notch. I really liked UK actor Ian McShane. He really put a lot into his role. He would be great in a re-vamp or updated format of the CBS series: The Equalizer.

the follow up Deadwood seasons were not quite as good. The producers made Timothy Olyphant's sheriff character way to dark and really twisted him up.

I don't know why Deadwood didn't have more black characters either. Some history writers say 30% of the "old west" were African American. I didn't see Deadwood Dick.

Beefy

[ComicBent]

I don't know why Deadwood didn't have more black characters either. Some history writers say 30% of the "old west" were African American.

I don't know about that claim, but I would doubt it. Where did they go? Their descendants certainly were not still there when I lived (as a child) in El Paso and Colorado Springs back in the 1950s.

Anyway, about Deadwood ...

I used to know that series backwards and forwards. I watched all the episodes of the first two seasons multiple times. I did not like the third year, though I watched every episode. I really hated the ending episode.

After the second season, I wrote an episode to enter in the Austin Film Festival in the teleplay category.

It went nowhere, of course.

One thing I learned from that experience is that one should never enter a contest with a submission that appeals to a niche or cult audience. The language of the series was sometimes coarse, sometimes poetically stilted, and sometimes just stilted in the normal way of the nineteenth century. Let's forget about the profanity for a moment (it was greatly exaggerated in the series anyway).

Any reader who was not a fan of the series and encountered that kind of formal language, with "big words" and complex sentences, might think the language was clumsy and that the writer was at fault. In fact, of course, the writer would just be imitating the normal dialogue of the series.

For me, one of the best aspects of the series was the elevated language, which worked at times and horribly misfired at others. Sometimes it was so tangled and obscure as to be unintelligible.

It was an enjoyable series.