How Deadwood went from eye-popping TV to a parade of old hams

Too much of the final season’s precious screen time was given over to Brian Cox and his caravan of creaky thespians

When it debuted in 2004, David Milch’s 1870s-set gold rush drama combined brutal violence with goddamn gutter poetry. Even now, to suggest this wildest of westerns is anything less than a masterpiece is to risk being lynched by its posse of admirers. Loyalty – a fluid commodity among the town’s dirtbags and desperadoes – has remained a constant among fans.

Perhaps that devotion lingers because they remember the sting of betrayal. Deadwood was cancelled by HBO in murky circumstances just before its third season aired in 2006. That corporate bushwhacking robbed Milch of the opportunity to craft any proper closure. Even if the rivalry of combustible lawman Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant) and sulphurous saloon kingpin Al Swearengen (Ian McShane) had been resolved – or at least put on hold in the common interest of the camp – the abrupt ending still left a bushel of plot threads dangling. The Deadwood project, never far from the mud but always mythic in its scope, thus finished on a sombre downswing.

It probably didn’t help that season three had already featured a memorable crescendo at its halfway point. In episode five, the simmering tension between incumbent powerbroker Al and ruthless incomer Hearst – a mining bigwig with designs on Deadwood’s rich seams – exploded on to the main thoroughfare. This ugly, vicious fistfight between Al’s loyal lieutenant Dan and Hearst’s burly enforcer ended up being literally eye-popping TV. Witnessing desperate Dan pluck out his opponent’s peeper was the sort of operatic climax that can define an entire series. Where do you go from there? The answer was: nowhere, really. Not even a pit-stop from Wyatt Earp and his shifty brother could invigorate the rest of Deadwood’s third season, which wrapped up with only the vaguest promise of a reckoning with the heartless Hearst.

What certainly did not help was that so much precious season three screen time was given over to theatrical impresario Jack Langrishe (Brian Cox) and his caravan of creaky thespians. Like Bullock and Swearengen, Langrishe was a real historical figure folded into Milch’s eloquent world-building. A claim of chiropractic skill granted him regular audiences with the literally crooked Hearst, but with such a sprawling and flamboyant company already in place, Langrishe and his powdered troupe felt like Deadwood dead weight. After a rewatch, it is easy to wish ill on the old ham: perhaps the story would have tightened up if Langrishe had been introduced to Mr Wu’s pigs, those tireless masticators of the town’s forsaken souls.

Thus, Deadwood ended in a fog of disenchantment. So it was all the more remarkable when last year’s belated movie sequel tied things up with such dignity and grace. It featured the welcome return of the vast majority of the regular cast, greyer round the temples mayhaps but still capable of turning the air blue. Langrishe, though, was nowhere to be seen or heard, and the elegiac epilogue was all the better for it.

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