I’m told I’ve lived through a “Golden Age of Television.” It was a time when the creativity cup of Hollywood ran over, sprinkling well-developed human drama dust on almost everything executives touched. Prestige abounded and audiences paid attention. Creators got their niche concepts green-lit; broadcast and cable executives put them on air and gave them ample room to breathe; daring audiences multiplied themselves on word of mouth. All the while critics had a voice that mattered and drove the national conversation or conversations at the water cooler – whichever embellishment you prefer.
The actual time span of this golden era is in dispute. Let’s say it started somewhere in the late 1990’s and ended sometime in the last few years. The actual dates don’t matter to me because I’m not convinced it ever happened. The received wisdom is that there was so much quality that it was inescapable and undeniable. We can look back to history and find countless shining examples of quality that didn’t exist before and doesn’t exist now. That’s not what I remember. That’s not what I’m seeing now. Everything I’ve read on the topic highlights a few stellar shows as emblems of the era without looking a little further at all the stuff that was popular or fiercely appreciated by a dedicated fanbase. What I see is an era like any other. A time when there were a handful of high quality shows, usually critically acclaimed and produced by skeptical executives with limited expectations, given ballast across networks by middling entertainment food pellets, and extremely popular crap that is mindless to the point where it may make the audience lose actual brain cells. The science has yet to be settled on that score.
So why am I telling you this? Why do I care? I recently watched all three seasons of Deadwood, and while I did stick with it, hoping for something, anything, to improve the quality of the show, I was struck by how bad it was overall. It’s possible it didn’t age well. Westerns never do, even when they are made through a more modern lens. I can’t completely discount that reasoning, but I will here, because I don’t buy it for one, and it blows up the larger argument I’m trying make.
Deadwood was always a show I was curious about. I’ve seen most of the highly-regarded HBO shows. The Wire is probably the best show ever made. I finally watched all of The Sopranos a couple of years ago and liked it, but not to the point where I can understand all of the mythologizing it’s taken on since going off air. Those two shows are the exemplars of what HBO was supposed to have meant for a time in television history – appointment television for the discerning viewer. Deadwood was one of those other shows – an example of the golden era without being the best, or at least that’s what I was led to believe.
What I actually found was a show lost in its own cloistered little world where characters do and say things in one episode or season and behave differently in others. The focus of the show gets lost in random asides and preening dialog that adds nothing to the world nor story.
The overarching concept is solid: the sordid affairs and power politics of a camp outside the jurisdiction of the US government and growing on the back of gold discoveries, making it too rich to ignore. It’s a world that attracts strivers, dreamers, grifters, madmen, and anyone else seeking their own fortune or hoping to swindle a piece of someone else’s. I like how it creates the opportunity to reorient our thinking of the west or the western away from good vs evil and heroes vs everyone else to something more nuanced, less focused on the perfection of one or more heroic characters. Deadwood is always focused on the small time players in the provincial little camp (except for the arrival of George Hearst in season 3), instead of the powerful people, entities, and governments who exercise indirect power outside the limits of the camp. Technology and functionaries edge into an episode or two but never become the driving focus. They exist only to whip the main characters into a frenzy of action.
The problem is the characters we do focus on. There is nothing wrong with everyone being morally ambiguous, but that crutch fails to keep the story upright when it becomes hard to understand their motivations. The wildcard antics are supposed to drive the narrative and provide depth to the world, but only serves to make it confusing.
Al is the top dog ruthless villain in the beginning of the story then vacillates between political dove, impotent figurehead, and vengeful menace with neither arc coming off as plausible in the face of how he was established. He wanted to kill a young girl who witnessed a robbery gone awry, then that girl became a weird obsession for every major character in the camp, while Al lost interest. He swindled Garret out of thousands of dollars, killed him when he realized he’d been misled, finds a massive vein of gold on the property in question, then doesn’t intervene when it falls into the hands of Garret’s wife. None of that makes any sense. Bullock is a former lawman, bent on making his fortune in business. He gets sucked into the role of sheriff to protect the independence of the camp, and nothing he does after that seems to align with any logical code or order based thought process. Trixie is going to be killed one day for insubordination and she’s no longer indentured to Al the next. The same goes for the Joanie and Cy relationship. Calamity Jane drinks all day and yells obscenities. She has no other meaningful role. I could go on, but none of it would make sense. We’d have no way of squaring behavior in one moment with that of another.
I think it was a lost opportunity to actually play up the greedy and violent nature of nascent capitalism establishing order at end of a gun barrel. Instead we see the middlemen of the grand experiment running around like chickens with their heads cut off. That is, in essence, the show. A backdrop and theme of something great foregrounding a swirl of nonsense. I generally hate how many shows use violence as an entree into storytelling. It comes off as cheap and sad. It creates an audience who wants ever more violence and less moralizing and talk. Walking Dead is a great example, so is any Quentin Tarantino movie. Deadwood only dabbled in violence and greed was never a clear driving force for many of the characters.
Deadwood was, in the end, a middling show. It’s the progenitor of the middling filler that Netflix has built an entire business model on, and not a shining example of great television that defined an age. We only ever have 5-7 total quality television shows running at any given time, while everything else is running on fumes to keep an audience focused. More than half are probably comedies, which is the one area where we do see more daring and interesting television. Even if there was no golden age of television or never will be again, I hope we can at least have a few dramas that reflect something essential about our world. I also hope people are willing to watch it when it is available.
