Review

Season 1

I generally like it. Not a subject matter I typically go for, but the show is quite well-made. Good acting all-around. I love the costume work. The money put into the show shows up on screen, which is always delightful to see. I greatly appreciate a period piece that goes the extra mile. In addition, I'm enjoying the often more cinematic camerawork. Certain angles and lighting you would expect to see in a film. I'm not disappointed per se when shows are a bit more simplistic in that area. It's just not something you expect a show to be able to keep up with for multiple seasons without just chewing through money (so I can see why we only made it 3 seasons...). Nice to have while it's here.

Tim the Elephant is always fun to watch whenever I've seen him. And I've always been a fan of Brad Dourif's work. I said out loud prior to us starting the show "Ooooh, I wonder what greasy loser he'll be playing this time?" Not a knock, to be clear. I'm totally a fan, he just has a particular character niche he fills really well. I'm thinking of Wormtongue or that mad scientist in Alien: Resurrection. But we have a doctor of honor here, so I was a quite off-base! Ian McShane is a terrifying but electric local mafioso/saloon owner. He tends to steal any scene he's in and he's far and away my favorite character of the show.

I've really enjoyed just seeing the town come together. Each episode you can see one or two more buildings come up. Hovels becoming actual places. Very satisfying.

Season 2

A good show. Though I wish there was a little more incidence. It feels like sometimes we don't take full advantage of the interesting setting. We almost never leave the actual town of Deadwood itself. But I think it could be effective if we had a few more instances of being out in the wilderness to provide a better contrast. A sense of "Oh, this is civilization. I'll stay right there." But in general the acting remains top-notch and the production is great. It very much feels like we have upped the High American setting on everyone. Surely after how well-received Al must've been from season 1.

The only actual plot I'm not convinced on is Bullock's family. The start of the season made me feel like they were gonna be a big deal that changed everything. But not all that much feels like it's changed. In particular, we throw his son away rather quickly. Feels like that should've been much more notable. And we haven't really given Anna Gunn much to do. She's fine acting-wise, but hasn't really made any decisions or affected much.

Season 3

The overwhelming feeling I had while watching season 3 is anxiety. The show is perfectly good. But I can see that we do not have enough runway to land this plane. It really feels like we haven't appropriately finished our plotlines. You can see that we're not heading towards a show finale, but rather a cancellation. Down a dark and lost highway with only unknowns at the end. It very much feels like we should at most be reaching a halfway point of the show. I like the show, but I can understand why it got cancelled. It feels like the writers have trouble putting away their toys. We're too often treading water. Too much time being taken getting everyone up on a stage and talking to each other without having much actually happen or develop. Realistically, I wouldn't say that the writers are doing bad work. We really just needed more time. But I get it.

The Movie

I dunno. It was generally good. The flashbacks were sinful as we discussed. The movie mostly just made me feel "This isn't the way this was supposed to go. We shouldn't even be here seeing this." It's unfortunate the show wasn't able to end on its own terms, whatever those may have been. Because that's largely my takeaway from the show as a whole now. High-quality, but does not end well. I don't see myself rewatching Deadwood at any point, because as it is the show feels like a lot of building up without concluding. The movie attempts to serve as a finale twenty years after the fact. But it feels so odd because even in-universe we're saying that this is ten years after. Ten years is still a long time. Why are things that happened ten years ago on everyone's mind? There's very little sense of progress in between the end of the show and the movie.

Twin Peaks: The Return is the obvious point of comparison here. There are precious few examples of a TV show getting cancelled before its time that miraculously gets a chance at life again years after the fact. Most other examples I can think of happened a pretty short period of time after the cancellation, or they remained a sparkle in someone's eye. In the case of the Return, Lynch was smart here. He used it as an opportunity to follow up on many things that were not able to be resolved in the original series' run. However, he also bends over backwards to not make every single little thing revolve around events that happened twenty-five years ago. We spend quite a lot of time in the Return seeing new people and new situations. So it's able to stand on its own as a thing that is worth seeing. The Return doesn't exist purely as a bandaid to the gaping wound that is the original series. Which is very much how the Deadwood movie feels to me. Necessary perhaps, but to me it serves only to draw more attention to the wound. The comparison isn't totally fair. The Return is the longest individual season of Twin Peaks and the Deadwood movie is, of course, just a movie. The screentime we have to work with is totally different. But I think it's worth comparing the deeper cinematic philosophies and why the Return works and to me the Deadwood movie does not. I think it would have been far better for the plot of the movie to not revolve around TV show events at all and simply have enough incidental detail in conversation that the viewer can fill in some of the blanks.

I don't think the show will really haunt me like other shows have. More just, if it comes up in conversation my primary thought is "That was a shame".