The Western meets 'NYPD Blue'
David Milch's 'Deadwood' turns cliches inside out
By Adam Dunn
Special to CNN
NEW YORK (CNN) -- Welcome to "Deadwood." It's not the type of Western town you're used to.
In this HBO show, premiering Sunday at 10 p.m., there's no dusty, highway-sized main street replete with tumbleweeds. In its place is a narrow, cramped sewage channel crammed with hawkers and low-lifes. Everything is caked with mud. Even the daytime sequences seem to take place at night.
This frontier outpost more closely resembles a bazaar at the bottom of a swamp than the latest addition to Manifest Destiny.
This is a Western according to "NYPD Blue" producer David Milch.
But Milch isn't far off from reality, said star Keith Carradine, who plays aging gunfighter legend Wild Bill Hickok and is familiar with the real Deadwood, South Dakota.
"It's very accurate. You have to remember that Deadwood was in the Black Hills of the Dakota Territory. It really sprang up in a riverbed. ... There are mountains on either side, the sunlight gets down there in the middle of the day, but the rest of time it's mostly in shadow."
"Shadow" is an interesting word to describe Deadwood, a classic lawless Western boomtown. The show is set in 1876, weeks after Gen. George Custer was killed at the Battle of Little Bighorn (Custer was also responsible for hyping the gold discovered in the area), and the area is being stampeded by prospectors looking for quick riches.
The show's characters include Hickok, a lawman named Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant), Calamity Jane (Robin Weigert), laudanum-taking prospector wife Alma Garret (Molly Parker), and the shifty Al Swearengen (Ian McShane).
'Sex, drugs and rocks'
 Ian McShane plays Al Swearengen, "Deadwood's" baddest of bad men. |  |
Swearengen is the spider at the center of the Deadwood web. His Gem saloon is the home of the camp's drinking, whoring and gambling. Anything interfering with these activities is deemed a problem to be quickly eradicated.
As he himself declares upon hearing news of the massacre of an immigrant family on the road to Spearfish, "Nobody's drinkin', nobody's gamblin', nobody's chasin' tail. I have to deal with that!"
He keeps his hand in the town's business, supplies the town's dope, and he's also a natural-born killer.
Of course, Milch told The Associated Press, few of these Western characters were pleasant men. They were, at best, risk-takers; at worst, criminals.
"Who the [heck] leaves home and goes into the wilderness ... and then lives where there's constant danger and the streets are knee-deep in [excrement]? Who does that?
"Someone who needs to!" he answered his own question.
Milch's goal, though, isn't to de-glorify the Old West. Carradine observed that Milch's interests are similar to those he dealt with on "NYPD Blue": How order is created out of chaos.
"Historically this place went from a population of zero to a population of over 10,000 in the space of about three months. Imagine that," he marveled. "What Milch is looking at is how order is established in a place where there is no order being applied from the outside, because it's an illegal place. No one was supposed to be there. There was no law, no national jurisdiction, no federal government involved. It was wild. ... I like to think of it as basically sex, drugs and rocks."
The Old West melting pot
|  "Deadwood" creator David Milch wrote for "Hill Street Blues" and was a producer of "NYPD Blue." |
In time, the combination of a damaging fire and the determination of Bullock brought Deadwood's rowdiness to heel. Not that it happened immediately -- or that Deadwood residents even noticed Bullock's arrival.
"One of my favorite things is the fact that after my character's introduced, in a fashion similar to a lot of Westerns, the next thing you'd normally expect is this character riding into town and everybody taking notice of this guy we've just met," said Olyphant. "But the fact that nobody gives a crap I think is very telling of everything that's going to take place after that."
"Deadwood" mixes actual and fictional people together, no mean feat considering the difficulties of setting a dramatic story within the confines of history. Carradine -- who said Milch "masterfully blended historical fact with the fiction necessary to flesh out a dramatic story like this one" -- dug into biographies and tapped into the expertise of his friend Walter Hill ("The Long Riders," "Wild Bill") to research Hickok.
In staying true to history, "Deadwood" also shows the West as a melting pot of America -- though it's an America seldom seen on Westerns.
And no one is especially fond of their own backgrounds -- or their neighbors'. Al Swearengen is of English descent (he curses his ancestors), a family of Norwegian immigrants heading for Minnesota slaughtered in the night is dismissed as "squareheads," the Sioux are "godless heathen," and an East Coast sharpie is a "dude." The great leveler is the town's vicious greed.
All of which are elements that can still be seen in today's America, said Carradine.
"It's a hackneyed term, but rugged individualism is what built this country. ... It is what makes us great and also what makes us fallible," he said.
Olyphant agreed. "No matter how many generations have been here or not, it still feels like you find yourself in a time trying to figure it out, what it means to be an American, and I think in a lot of respects, it's constantly being redefined and challenged," he said.
"Post-9/11, when you're looking at America and its role in the world, it's very confusing. It's not much different [from the Old West] in that respect. It's just a bunch of guys trying to figure it out."
HBO is a division of Time Warner, as is CNN.
Copyright 2004 CNN. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Associated Press contributed to this report.
