Deadwood

Milch, Hill and the Wild Bill crew

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Deadwood is David Milch’s show, and it helps to know where he was coming from. He learned the craft of television writing on Hill Street Blues and went on to co-create NYPD Blue with Steven Bochco. Both shows are about how institutions keep order. His first pitch to HBO wasn’t a Western at all. It was a series about law arriving in ancient Rome. HBO already had Rome in development, so Milch kept the question and moved it to the Black Hills in 1876. He writes the premiere himself and gives it to Walter Hill, who made The Long Riders and, in 1995, wrote and directed Wild Bill, a film about Hickok’s last days. Hill brings that film’s cinematographer, Lloyd Ahern II, and its editor, Freeman A. Davies. Keith Carradine, who played Buffalo Bill Cody in Wild Bill, now plays Hickok himself. This isn’t a pilot made by people learning the territory.

Milch wrote Al Swearengen for Ed O’Neill, and the part reached Ian McShane only after the network passed on O’Neill and Powers Boothe fell ill. McShane makes Swearengen someone who prices everything first and feels about it later, if at all. When Trixie kills a customer, he beats her over what the death will cost him. Timothy Olyphant plays Seth Bullock as a man whose temper and principles arrive in the same breath. John Hawkes’s Sol Star is the partner who would like to sell pans and stay out of it. All thirteen leads appear in the first hour.

One day and one night

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The episode opens in Montana. Seth Bullock, the territorial marshal, is about to give up the badge and head for Deadwood, a gold camp on Sioux land in the Dakota Territory, where he and Sol Star plan to open a hardware store. In his jail sits Clell Watson, a horse thief sentenced to hang, who has heard there’s no law in Deadwood at all. A drunken posse comes for Watson. Bullock won’t give him up. He walks Watson outside, lets him say his last words and hangs him from the front porch himself.

In Deadwood, Bullock and Star rent a lot from Dan Dority, who tells them the rent goes to Al Swearengen every morning. Swearengen owns the Gem Saloon. Inside, Trixie, one of the Gem’s prostitutes, shoots an abusive customer in the head. He dies just after Doc Cochran arrives. Swearengen beats Trixie, and Cochran and Johnny Burns take the body to Mr. Wu, who leads the camp’s Chinese community and feeds it to his pigs.

Wild Bill Hickok rides in with Charlie Utter and Calamity Jane, and the camp notices. Hickok sits down to poker and loses, while Jack McCall, in a corner of Tom Nuttall’s No. 10 Saloon, swears he’ll beat him at cards. Swearengen has a bigger game going. With E.B. Farnum and Tim Driscoll, a man who owes the Gem money, he sells Brom Garret, a rich New Yorker, a gold claim that’s already worked out. Driscoll pushes the price higher than planned to raise his cut, so Swearengen keeps the money against his debt and tells Dority to kill him. Garret takes the news of his purchase back to his wife, Alma, who hears it through a haze of laudanum.

Then Ned Mason rides in saying the Sioux have massacred the Metz family on the road. He says he saw two dead children. Everyone knows the Metzes had three. Hickok and Bullock raise a party to look for the missing girl, and on the way out Bullock tells Hickok he doesn’t believe Mason. Swearengen, afraid a search will empty his saloon, offers free drinks and cheap women to anyone who stays. The riders find the wrecked wagon, the dead family and young Sofia Metz, hurt but alive in the brush. Back at the Gem, Dority kills Driscoll. At dawn the party returns, Calamity Jane carries Sofia to Doc Cochran, and Hickok and Bullock accuse Mason of staging the raid to rob the family. Mason draws, and Hickok kills him. Swearengen watches from his balcony, then goes to bed with Trixie, still bruised from his hands.

The badge and the business

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The episode keeps returning to one question: what holds a town together when nobody has the authority to govern it? Milch has said he thought of the badge as a stand-in for the cross, a thing people organize their lives around. Bullock’s last act as a marshal shows what that looks like up close. He hangs a man so a mob can’t. It’s the law doing its job, and it’s also mercy, and it’s also one man deciding, on his own porch, that the sentence happens now and he will carry it out. The scene doesn’t pick between those readings, and it’s stronger for it. The law Bullock carries into Deadwood is only as real as his willingness to use force.

Swearengen isn’t the opposite of that. He’s building an order of his own. The rent comes due every morning. The bodies go to Wu’s pigs. Driscoll dies because he threatened a sale, and free whiskey keeps the camp in the Gem while a child is missing. Everyone in Deadwood learns who holds power and what crossing him costs. Bullock and Swearengen aren’t the same man, but they’re working on the same problem from opposite ends, and that’s what makes the conflict between them worth watching.

What’s remarkable about the pace isn’t how much happens. It’s that you can follow it. A crowded premiere usually stops to explain who everyone is. This one lets people show you by what they do. Calamity Jane rides in as Hickok’s foul-mouthed company, then carries Sofia to the doctor, and that one act tells you who she is. Milch makes you learn the camp by listening. The talk is dense, profane and full of debts nobody spells out, and watching it feels like walking into a room where the argument started a year ago. Even the night is cut to keep you oriented. The search party finds Sofia alive at the same time Dority kills Driscoll at the Gem, so the camp’s two kinds of business close in one stretch of the dark.

The setting is part of the argument, too. The 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie guaranteed the Black Hills to the Lakota, and Deadwood was settled on that land illegally. The massacre story works on the town because the settlers are ready to believe the danger comes from outside. Bullock and Hickok decide the man telling it staged the raid to rob the family, and when they say so, he goes for his gun. The town rides out expecting Sioux raiders, and the man it ends up facing rode in from the road with everyone else. The episode doesn’t claim that explains all the violence in Deadwood. It just won’t let the old line between settlers and savages stand.

By morning, nothing is settled and everything is in place. Bullock came to Deadwood to sell hardware, not to keep order, and his first business in the camp is paying rent to Swearengen. The man who hanged Clell Watson on principle now pays the man who feeds bodies to the pigs. The law arrives in Deadwood as a tenant.

What I Liked

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• The cold open. A condemned horse thief asks if it’s true there’s no law in Deadwood. The series’ premise arrives as a question from a man about to hang.
• “That’s poor damn timing at the least.” Watson complains he stole a horse at the wrong moment, with gold in the streams and no law in Deadwood, and Bullock gives him that. Milch’s dialogue is funny as well as filthy.

What I Disliked

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• Nothing.