Asking the Wrong Questions

Ian McShane believes the promised Deadwood films aren't going to happen: I asked him the big question Deadwood fans have been wanting to know for a while now -- was HBO just blowing smoke with its promise to wrap up the series with a couple of made-for-TV movies? Well, the answer is yes, McShane revealed to us. "I just got a call on Friday from ... a dear friend of mine, who told me that they're packing up the ranch," McShane said. "They're dismantling the ranch and taking the stuff out. That ship is gonna sail. Bonsoir, Deadwood." He went on to say that even if the movies were happening, there would be the strike to consider, and on top of that, he's committed to a filming schedule that would prevent him from doing them anytime before late next year anyway. (Link via ) I've been thinking for a while about the Deadwood situation as compared to the fates of shows like Veronica Mars , Jericho , Farscape , Futurama , and other series that have be...

...but I probably would have, if I'd thought of it. Happily, such extremes are no longer necessary--Dan has supplemented his excellent essays about the show's first and second seasons with some thoughts about the third : Swearengen spends much of the season trying to marshal a force large enough to combat Hearst's own when the time comes for gunplay, but ultimately he is instead forced to kill an innocent girl merely to ensure his town's diminished survival. There is no fighting a man like Hearst, nor the sort of world his type of person brings. In that world, Swearengen will carry on much as before - there will always be pimps and drug dealers - but he will not be master of his own fate. Civilization has come to 'Deadwood', and it means the end of total libterty. The age of the cowboys are over - this is the true creation of a nation. The viewer has thought they were watching a battle, but they never were. They were watching a rout.

Hate me if you want to, but at this point, I'm actually relieved that Deadwood has been cancelled. Those of you who read my pre-season wish list might feel that I'm being a tad ungrateful, perhaps even hypocritical. After all, I did wrap up that essay by concluding that if I have a wish list for Deadwood's third season, it is that its main characters return to form--that Bullock become again a player in the town's politics, that Al demonstrate the capacity and the willingness to hurt even those who might not deserve it, that Cy be marginalized, and that Hearst prove a more interesting, more believable character than Wolcott. Which, by and large, is what the third season has delivered. Cy was indeed marginalized--not only in terms of the character's screen time but within the story itself. Much as I would have preferred to see Cy unceremoniously dumped from the show, there was a certain gratification to be found in watching him realize how incidental to the running...

Hopefully this doesn't shatter anyone's illusions, but a lot of the early pieces on this blog were reworked versions of essays I had written months, and sometimes even years, before it came into existence. Not having a forum for them, I put them aside, satisfied that I had at least gotten what I wanted to say out of my system. After AtWQ came into being, I found myself going back to my archives and digging out some of these old essays in order to repost them here. This piece is the very last one of them--based, albeit quite loosely, on a wish list I wrote nearly a year ago, at the end of Deadwood 's second season. Happily, just as the show's third (and apparently not-quite-final) season is about to get started, some of my online friends have begun watching and writing about the first two--check out Dan Hartland's essays about the first and second seasons, and the discussion that arose when Niall Harrison expressed his dissatisfaction with the show--which helped ...