Best Ever
Western Drama?

The first corpse appears within minutes. By the end of the pilot, you’ve seen murder, prostitution, a child orphaned by road agents, and Ian McShane delivering profanity with the precision of iambic pentameter. Deadwood announced itself as something unprecedented: a Western that took the genre’s violence seriously while wrapping it in language so dense and strange it approached poetry. David Milch didn’t make a show about the Old West. He made a show about how the Old West became America.

The setting is the real Deadwood, South Dakota, 1876 — a gold camp in Indian territory, technically illegal, beyond the reach of law. Into this vacuum flow prospectors, gamblers, whores, and con men, all trying to extract wealth before the law arrives to regulate them. The central tension isn’t good versus evil; it’s chaos versus order, and the show is honest enough to admit that order brings its own corruptions.

Al Swearengen, McShane’s saloon-keeper and crime boss, is the show’s black hole. He’s a murderer, a pimp, a manipulator who’d slit your throat for inconveniencing him. He’s also the closest thing Deadwood has to a civic leader, the man who makes the trains run on time because disorder is bad for business. McShane plays him as Shakespeare’s Richard III relocated to the frontier — charismatic, terrifying, weirdly sympathetic because he’s the only one being honest about what power requires.

Timothy Olyphant’s Seth Bullock provides the moral counterweight. A former Montana marshal, Bullock comes to Deadwood to escape the law’s demands, only to find himself drawn back into its enforcement. His rage — barely controlled, occasionally explosive — is the show’s study of what righteousness costs. Bullock wants to be good, and wanting to be good in Deadwood is a kind of violence.

Milch’s dialogue is the show’s signature. Characters speak in elaborate, profane, syntactically complex sentences that no real nineteenth-century person ever uttered. The anachronism is deliberate — Milch wanted the language to feel foreign, to remind viewers that the past is another country. The profanity isn’t shock value; it’s texture, a way of marking Deadwood as outside polite society’s rules. When characters begin speaking more formally, you know civilization is encroaching.

The ensemble is HBO-deep. Robin Weigert’s Calamity Jane, a disaster of a person holding herself together with alcohol and bluster. Paula Malcomson’s Trixie, Swearengen’s whore, whose education and ambition make her the show’s quiet revolutionary. W. Earl Brown’s Dan Dority, Al’s enforcer, whose loyalty is total and whose violence is stomach-turning. Every speaking role feels inhabited.

The show was canceled after three seasons, its story incomplete, and the absence aches. The 2019 movie provided some closure but couldn’t replace the seasons that should have been. What remains is a fragment of something great — a Western that understood the genre’s lies and told a harder truth about how communities form, how power consolidates, how the American project was always bloody and compromised and somehow still worth doing.

Welcome to fucking Deadwood.

David Milch: The Best Ever is civilization as a protection racket. Is Deadwood the Best Ever Western Series? You tell us.

Decide for Yourself:

• The Complete Series Blu-ray includes all three seasons with the definitive HD transfer.
• The Ultimate Collection includes the 2019 movie alongside the original series.
• The original DVD box set includes extensive commentaries from Milch.