Deadwood Season 2

Thanks to friends with HBO OnDemand, I watched the complete second season of Deadwood this past weekend. After 11 hours of the show I can unreservedly call it my favorite currently ongoing tv series. The writers maintained and perhaps even exceeded the quality of the first season, building upon already introduced characters, plots, and themes while introducing new faces and new problems for the residents of the mining camp to deal with.

I am continually impressed by the dialogue of the show. Much was made early on about the cursing, which is prevalent and rather amusing, but this overlooks the rest of the dialogue which is extremely intelligent and almost poetic. I find it hard to believe that people would really talk that way, but it makes the show that much more worth watching and listening to closely.

The longer I watched the show the more I liked Al Swearingen (ostensibly a bad guy when we first meet him) and the less I liked Seth Bullock (ostensibly the hero from the get-go). This shifting of character perception seems planned, certainly a lot of work is put into making Al sympathetic and full of depth of feeling, while Seth retains a certain opacity due to his characteristic stern demeanor. In there own way, they both hide their feelings from the outside world, but Al is so much more outgoing and active that we get to see more of him than the silent Bullock.

It occurs to me, in the context of the comments Harry Mathews made in the above interview, that in Deadwood we don’t really see characters change, rather we see them in different ways and in different situations reacting to different events. It’s about our perception developing as we learn more, not about the characters developing.

I look forward to the DVDs so I can rewatch the show. I’m certain it will be rewarding.

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