I didn't like itDEADWOOD R.I.P.
July 16th 2009 02:36
Just finished watching the whole deadwood series on DVD. Heard there was a bit of an outcry amongst the intelligentsia when the series was axed by the number-crunchers at HBO (the story goes that HBO didn't 'own' the series, it was produced by Paramount and HBO were apparently hardly making a dime off it).
What happend? Was it really all down to the bean-counters? Certainly if Deadwood had been a hit of Sopranos type proportions they never would have axed it. There must have been other factors. Was the show too challenging for audiences unaccustomed to scenes with multiple layers of psychological insight and subtext concealed beneath the expletive filled ornate 19th century english?
It may be hard to figure out what's going on a lot of the time, but that I think is a good thing. I don't know why audiences want everything telegraphed and spelled out for them. Surely it is more realistic to have things ambivalent, subtLe, think of the 'scenes' of your life, or other lives you observe, a lot of the time you don't know precisely what's going on, what people are thinking, what their motivations are. I think it's good that David Milch forces the audience to actively participate in the narrative, rather than instructing us how to feel every single moment.
Another criticism: in yet another departure from the traditional panoramic cinemascope Hollywood Western, visually it looks, well, horrible. I wonder, was the atmosphere of claustrophobic isolation down to budget limits and shooting on a studio backlot? In any case, great writing will only only take you so far. If the The Searchers had been shot on digital with a TV aesthetic, with horrible focus pulls, garish lighting, no locations, would it still be a classic?
So are any of the above quibbles the reason it got axed? Perhaps they contributed, but what really happened I think is that most of the audience got lost in season 2, which, truth be told, was unbelievably boring. I mean, absolutely nothing happened. I finished the second series and had to force myself to get on with season 3. After a couple of episodes of season 3 things quickly pick up again as the power struggles and intrigues between Swearingen, Bullock and Hearst build to a satisfying finale, but by this point I figure Deadwood had lost a lot of viewers won over by the terrific first season, and probably gained very few new ones. By the time Season 3 came around to redeem things, the opportunity had been lost.
Don't want to come down too hard on Deadwood, in a just world David Milch would have seen his vision through to the end, and it's a crime that we'll never get a season 4.
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