HBO: Deadwood (1 Viewer)

[Todd Terwilliger]

I was really looking forward to this and I liked the opening. I like the tone they've set for the series and the dark, gritty look of the show. Anyone else give it a look?

 

[todbnla]

YES, looks good so far, another keeper maybe?

 

[Todd Terwilliger]

I think so. I hope so. I like the Marshall, he had that Michael Biehn type feel to him.

 

[Jefe Noche]

WOW!!!!!!!! Great opener. Hardcore!!! It made a great episode of The Sopranos seem kinda slow....lol.

 

[Matthew_S]

i liked this but had some trouble figuring out what was going on sometimes...I felt like i was watching a foreign film without subtitles at times and no, i'm not an idiot.

 

[Chuck C]

I think they said F more times during Deadwood than during tonight's Sopranos

 

[Todd Terwilliger]

Chuck,

I did notice that the writers sprinkled the dialog with a liberal amount of explatives. Hopefully, it's not something that will be distracting.

 

[Everlasting Gobstopper]

Anyone know if Brad Dourif showed up in this episode? He's listed in the opening credits, but I couldn't pick him out. Though, with all the facial hair running rampant through the show, it's tough to pick anyone out. Neat seeing Jeffrey Jones on the show. His character seems to be a bit like Saul Rubinek's character in Unforgiven. Anyone know what Jones' current status is? I assume this was shot before his legal troubles began. Also, does anyone know what else the guy who runs the brothel/bar/casino has been in? I could swear I've seen him before, in a tough guy role. Looking forward to seeing how this pans out.

 

[Wayne Bundrick]

Dourif was the doctor who tended to the man shot in the head. What a great actor.

 

[TonyD]

quote:
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from the review in the phila inquirer today. http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/ent...rm/8216987.htm

"deadwood has more profanity per minute then any other series in tv history,..."
"he (milch) spent more then a year researching deadwood."

"That's the way they spoke," he told the critics, regaling them with tales of ear-witnesses and analysis by H.L. Mencken. "The lawlessness of the language is... something that I hope people will get used to. It establishes an atmosphere, verbally, in which anything is possible. It is the rejection of everything, except brute force."

There are no firm plans yet to extend the 12-episode series, but Milch was asked about bringing Deadwood back.

The camp, he responded, constantly reinvented itself. All the gold was gone from the surface within a year, when William Randolph Hearst's father, George, bought up the claims and brought in Chinese laborers to sink shafts.

A cyanide cloud, a byproduct of the gold separation process, hung over the town. There was a flood, so the buildings were put up on stilts, and the Chinese moved underneath and joined with whites to establish opium dens. Women were brought in as prostitutes, given opium, and worked till they died.

"And the whites," Milch said, "would cut trapdoors into the bottoms of their buildings so they could descend and not be seen... . So there [were] the floors of hell and the cyanide cloud above it... .

"So the answer is, 'Yeah. You could do a second season.' "

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[Wayne Bundrick]

Or maybe he's the undertaker.

 

[Todd Terwilliger]

Tony,

Thanks for the link.

 

[Wayne Bundrick]

I noticed that Walter Hill is involved in producing this show and he directed this episode.

 

[JonZ]

"I like the Marshall, he had that Michael Biehn type feel to him"

It took me awhile to realize who he was - the guy frrom Scream 3 and Go.

I love westerns and thought this was really good. The only thing was the language. Im not so sure some of the words they used existed at that time

 

[Everlasting Gobstopper]

Looking at the handy Oxford English Dictionary date charts, "fuck" has been around since 1503, the earliest known written use of "cocksucker" dates to 1895 (about 19 years after Deadwood takes place, but don't forget that England was in the Victorian era, so words like that generally wouldn't have been written down), the earliest known written use of "mother fucker" dates to 1918. Hope this helps!

 

[Mike Slade]

I only watched about 20 minutes of the show last night and I found it distracting. To me it seeemed like they were just putting it in there because they could.

 

[Everlasting Gobstopper]

I personally don't find the expletives superfluous. These people have abandoned society, along with the trappings of the law. What would cause someone to do that, and what kinds of people would do that? If you accept that there is no law, then the rules of conduct disappear, and it becomes perfectly acceptable to kill, to swear liberally, to cheat people, basically to do whatever you want. They talk about the "godless heathens" that surround them, but they themselves are far worse than any of the Native Americans who are out there.

 

[Lew Crippen]

I thought that it was a promising beginning—it has a really good feel. As for the language, regardless of wheatear or not any particular word was in use at the time, it is not likely that men who have chosen to locate to a lawless place and compete with each other in the most basic (and base) sense would not use whatever cures words had meaning at that time. If the writers are helping us understand the then current use, by updating some language, that seems a reasonable approach.

And as long as cards are being played in Deadwood, we wait with baited breath for Wild Bill to hold aces and eights. I’m not even going to refresh my memory of the date he was shot, so that I don’t lessen the suspense
.

 

[Leo Hinze]

I'm glad I wasn't the only one who noticed the gratuitous profanity. I have nothing against profanity, and I wasn't alive during that period of history so I don't know what words were in common usage then, but the constant swearing was a distraction for me, as opposed to a show like The Sopranos or SFU, where the profanity does not seem out of place. I thought the way the language was used was too modern.

I don't disagree that the people in the show are the type who would have cursed. Aside from the above mentioned OED entries, does anybody know of any writings from/of the time that document what words were in use and how they were used? Or was society so polite then and censors so effective since that real representative fiction and non-fiction is unavailable?

About the show, though, I didn't watch the whole thing, but I enjoyed what I saw.

Updated: Just did a google, and this Milch character did a bunch of research, and this is how they talked back then. Now I'm sad that the science of profanity has progressed so little in the last 150 years that we still cuss like they did way back then.

 

[Todd Terwilliger]

As mentioned above, Brad Dourif plays the town doctor.

He was great and added a nice creepy touch to a usually pillar-of-society character. The way he poked the dead man's head through with the metal rod while in awe of how he lived so long after being shot was great.