(HBO Dramatic Series) 1876. In the Black Hills of South Dakota lies Deadwood a lawless town inhabited by a mob of restless misfits ranging from an ex-lawman to a scheming saloon owner to the legendary Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane. The richest gold strike in American history provides the backdrop for HBO's next great drama.Running Time: 720 min.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA UPC: 026359243028 Manufacturer No: 92430

The remarkable first season of Deadwood represents one of those periodic, wholesale reinventions of the Western that is as different from, say, Lonesome Dove as that miniseries is from Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo or the latter is from Anthony Mann's The Naked Spur. In many ways, HBO's Deadwood embraces the Western's unambiguous morality during the cinema's silent era through the 1930s while also blazing trails through a post-NYPD Blue, post-The West Wing television age exalting dense and customized dialogue. On top of that, Deadwood has managed an original look and texture for a familiar genre: gritty, chaotic, and surging with both dark and hopeful energy. Yet the show's creator, erstwhile NYPD Blue head writer David Milch, never ridicules or condescends to his more grasping, futile characters or overstates the virtues of his heroic ones.

Set in an ungoverned stretch of South Dakota soon after the 1876 Custer massacre, Deadwood concerns a lawless, evolving town attracting fortune-seekers, drifters, tyrants, and burned-out adventurers searching for a card game and a place to die. Others, particularly women trapped in prostitution, sundry do-gooders, and hangers-on have nowhere else to go. Into this pool of aspiration and nightmare arrive former Montana lawman Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant) and his friend Sol Starr (John Hawkes), determined to open a lucrative hardware business. Over time, their paths cross with a weary but still formidable Wild Bill Hickok (Keith Carradine) and his doting companion, the coarse angel Calamity Jane (Robin Weigert); an aristocratic, drug-addicted widow (Molly Parker) trying to salvage a gold mining claim; and a despondent hooker (Paula Malcomson) who cares, briefly, for an orphaned girl. Casting a giant shadow over all is a blood-soaked king, Gem Saloon owner Al Swearengen (Ian McShane), possibly the best, most complex, and mesmerizing villain seen on TV in years. Over 12 episodes, each of these characters, and many others, will forge alliances and feuds, cope with disasters (such as smallpox), and move--almost invisibly but inexorably--toward some semblance of order and common cause. Making it all worthwhile is Milch's masterful dialogue--often profane, sometimes courtly and civilized, never perfunctory--and the brilliant acting of the aforementioned performers plus Brad Dourif, Leon Rippy, Powers Boothe, and Kim Dickens. --Tom Keogh

I got this series for my husbands birthday. He had watched a few shows on HBO and was interested in seeing more. It is a very well done series - great acting, costumes, directing etc. It was interesting to see how the town of Deadwood started. If you can get past the profanity and the violence especially against women it is well worth the purchase.

I got this for my parents and they loved it so much that they insist on lending it out for other people to watch. You gotta buy this series its excellent!!!

After watching all of the Soprano's and Carnivale episodes over the years I figured it would be nearly impossible to improve on them. I was wrong! This is unquestionably the best dramatic western series ever done for television! Imaginative and captivating while keeping historical perspective, it never ceased to keep you eagerly anticipating more of the same. Unfortunately, just when it seemed there would be much more to come, the brain-donors in charge of programming at HBO decided to cancel this immensely popular, award winning, hit series (in the same delicate fashion as Carnivale). It will be sorely missed. Nuts! to HBO.

This series had us captivated. The actors were well chosen for their parts. The off colored language didn't become offensive to us as it seemed to fit right in to the story and become part of the character. We were sorry to have it end. Maybe if they had been able to finish the story and build up to the end it would have been easier to accept.

Deadwood is one of the best TV shows ever made. If we consider it with films thrown into the mix as well, it would be the best western of all time. Its dramatic impact as well as the depth and complexity of its characters are almost unparalleled. It easily puts other, more popular shows to shame, making The Sopranos, for instance, seem sophomoric and silly in comparison. Obviously the show is awesome, so instead of writing yet another review, I will offer some random comments and fun facts.

-First, the cast is almost flawless. Almost. What would have been a flawless cast suffers greatly because of one of its leads: Timothy Olyphant. How did he land that role? He can't act and he's goofy looking. Watching him walk around the streets of Deadwood throwing his pseudo-menacing glances around with the acting depth of Steven Seagal is laughable. Even more laughable are his constant attempts to imitate Clint Eastwood. Too bad.

-Many people objected to the profanity in the show. It is both anachronistic and accurate. How? Well, it's accurate in that people would have been cussing, a lot. They just wouldn't have been using the words that we today like to use. Milch thought it would be too comedic to have a bunch of people running around saying things like "You dern varmint" and sounding like Yosemite Sam, so he opted instead for the anachronistic, modern profanities used instead. This fact is poked fun at in one episode when Farnum makes a comment about an ancient Italian maxim. Wolcott says it's "s#!t out of luck," to which Farnum replies that people probably didn't really talk that way back then.

-Other than the anachronistic swear words, the language used is pretty authentic in my opinion. The language would have been a mixture of rough miner talk and Victorian-era discourse. Educated people were much more eloquent back then than they are today, a fact that is well represented in the complex dialogue exchanges in the show.

-Deadwood is high on the verisimilitude scale. It feels authentic, but is full of historical inaccuracies. Many of the characters are based on real people, such as Al Swearengen, Seth Bullock, Sol Star, Calamity Jane, Hickok and Charlie Utter. In real life, however, Bullock was married to his childhood sweetheart, not his sister-in-law. The Bella Union was owned by one Tom Miller. Cy, Joannie and Eddie are fictional characters. So is Alma.

-The guy going around with the "soap with a prize inside" scam is based on Soapy Smith. He would attract large audiences with this claim. An accomplice in the audience would buy a bar and find that cash was in the wrapper. Audience members saw Smith placing large bills in certain wrappers and then placing those soaps in with the others, but, through sleight of hand, none of these were actually sold to customers. He would sell down the stack of soap, with accomplices "finding" cash in their soap wrappers. He would then announce that the soap with the $100 bill hasn't been purchased yet, and auction off all the rest of the bars at a high price. In reality none of the wrappers had cash in them. In real life Soapy Smith was very successful, running criminal enterprises larger than Swearengen's. I do not think he ever operated in Deadwood. His most famous scam was a "telegraph office" in Alaska where he would charge people to send telegrams. Apparently nobody realized that there were no telegraph lines leading to the town (or the telegraph office for that matter).

-Some other interesting tidbits on factual characters: In real life Charlie Utter was very dashing and charismatic. He only wore the finest suits, was very particular about his long, blond hair and moustache, and insisted on bathing each and every day--something that was quite unusual then. If accurately portrayed, Utter would have perhaps been the most dashing character on the show. In her autobiography Calamity Jane claims that she is Wild Bill's ex wife. Hickok's funeral was a big to do in real life, not a small ceremony. History has it that Hickok always sat with his back to a corner to avoid being attacked from behind, and that on that night in Nuttall's No. 10 saloon there simply wasn't a seat available with its back to a wall. The show, however, suggests that Hickok had a death wish and knew that McCall was going to kill him.

-Deadwood magazine claims that the real Al Swearengen was much more sinister and brutal than how he is portrayed in the show. He would lure women to Deadwood with false promises and then beat them until they agreed to work as prostitutes. He was married when the show takes place, but his wife left him on the grounds of abuse. He was married two more times. Both wives also left him because of abuse. Swearengen's original saloon featured "prize fights" between miners. The winners never actually received prizes. When he opened The Gem Variety Theater he made as much as $10,000 a night, which would today be equivalent to as much as $180,000 a night! The original Gem burned down in 1879, two years after season three of the show occurs. It was later rebuilt much larger. The real Swearengen was from Iowa, not England, and Wikipedia reports that a recently recovered obituary shows that he was found dead in Denver in 1904 with a massive head wound.

-If you're like me, and like your whiskey, watching this show will want to make you drink some. I tried to find what whiskey they would be drinking on the show. Another anachronism emerged: Whiskey bottles would not have had printed labels on them back then. There would be some glass, embossed bottles, but the whiskey at The Gem would come in barrels and likely be served in ceramic jugs. Some whiskeys that may have been drunk: They mention Basil Hayden on the show. Beam produces a pricy Basil Hayden whiskey, but know that Basil Hayden's recipe is today sold as Old Grand-Dad (Grand-Dad being Basil Hayden). Old Overholt was the most popular whiskey in Tombstone, and is the best (and cheapest) rye still made today. Rye was probably more common than sour mash, though in one episode Wolcott specifically orders "Kentucky Bourbon." Hickok however, liked rye. Old Overholt was also Abraham Lincoln's favorite drink. Old Crow is another (they all start with "Old"). Old Crow was Ulysses S. Grant's favorite. It is said that someone reported on Grant's drunkenness to Lincoln. Lincoln said, "I wish you knew what kind of whiskey he drank. I'd have a barrel sent to all of my generals." My wife suggested the drinking game of getting one of these whiskey's and drinking whenever they do on the show. Others have commented on the mythic feats of drinking portrayed on Deadwood. Just keep in mind that the whiskey they were drinking would have been very watered down.

-Fans are rightly pissed at the show's being cancelled. Deadwood was better than The Sopranos and was also better than Six Feet Under, both of which were given six seasons. A year or so ago HBO still said there was about a 50/50 chance on the two, two-hour TV movies it promised to rap up the show's plotlines. In a recent interview, however, Ian McShane (who played Swearengen) said that these TV movies will never be made, as they are tearing down the show's elaborate set already. He said this officially means that "Deadwood is Dead," and added something to the effect that "if this makes you upset, imagine how I feel."