feature story
Twelve years after a surprise cancellation,
the ‘Deadwood’ team reunites
By Kenneth Andeel
TV Media
H
BO’s long-awaited movie-
length footnote to David
Milch’s 2004 to 2006 series
“Deadwood” finally rides into
town on Friday, May 31, provid-
ing fans an official conclusion
after more than a decade of
anticipation.
Miraculously, nearly every-
one from the original cast has
returned for “Deadwood’s”
swan song. The two faces of the
series, Ian McShane (“American
Gods”) and Timothy Olyphant
(“Justified”), reprise their
respective roles as cutthroat
saloon proprietor Al Swearengen
and stubbornly principled law-
man Seth Bullock. Olyphant and
McShane are only two of the
many returning “Deadwood”
alumni who went on to find
enormous success elsewhere
after the 2006 demise of the
show, including Paula Malcom-
son (“Ray Donovan”), Dayton
Callie (“Sons of Anarchy”),
Anna Gunn (“Breaking Bad”),
Robin Weigert (“Marvel’s Jessica
Jones”) and Brad Dourif (“Once
Upon a Time”). Against all odds,
the huge ensemble cast has
reconvened to deliver one final
send-off to the show that gave
many of them their break in the
television industry.
Back in 2004, “Deadwood”
was an unusual creature. It had
the superficial trappings of a clas-
sic western but refused to indulge
in the sort of palatable good-
versus-evil tales found in many
examples of that genre. Cowboy/
outlaw duels and fancy
gunplay set pieces
were replaced with
terrifying and re-
alistic outbursts
of violence, and the
show seemed obsessed
with exploring
the thin line
between
civilization
and chaos,
using the
illegal
frontier
settle-
ment of
Dead-
20 | Screentime
wood, North Dakota, as the
crucible for its analyses. The lan-
guage in “Deadwood” eschewed
historical realism in favour of
dense, ornate dialogue packed
with modern profanity that called
to mind an obscene Shakespeare
more than it did a doughty man
of few words like Clint Eastwood.
When “Deadwood” pre-
miered, it was an immediate
critical darling, but it never
found the ratings footing it
needed to survive beyond three
seasons. The critical acclaim
never slowed over those three
years, with the show winning
eight Emmys (from a total 28
nominations), but other factors
eventually led to the show’s
demise. “Deadwood” was noto-
rious for its chaotic set, with its
unpredictable showrunner, Da-
vid Milch (“NYPD Blue”), doing
things like rewriting dialogue
for performers on the fly or re-
placing scripts with completely
rewritten material immediately
before a day of filming began.
Between the modest ratings
and the stressful set, “Dead-
wood” was a logical target for
cancellation, and in a surprise
decision following the Season
3 finale, HBO announced that
it would not be picking up the
cast’s options, indicating that a
fourth season was unlikely. The
HBO brass and Milch parted
amicably, with HBO going out of
its way to declare that the show
was not officially canceled as
such, and the door was left open
to a continuation of the series in
one form or another somewhere
down the road.
Based on that “soft” cancella-
tion, and the public statements
of cast members claiming that
they’d be willing to return
to some sort of wrap-up
project for “Deadwood,” it
didn’t take long for rumours
of a return to start flying.
Reports in 2007 had
Milch agreeing to
produce a pair of
telefilms to close
out the show, but
Timothy
Olyphant
stars in
“Deadwood:
The Movie”
May 29, 2019 | East Oregonian and Hermiston Herald
that project never moved forward
in a serious way. The cast of the
show dispersed, “Deadwood’s”
sets were eventually dismantled,
and Milch pursued other projects.
Every few years rumours of a
return sparked again, but as time
rolled on, the prospect seemed
more and more unlikely.
Then, in 2016, HBO’s program-
ming boss indicated that the
network had given Milch the
go-ahead to write a new movie-
length “Deadwood” script. Two
years later came the final an-
nouncement that the movie was
on, most of the cast were return-
ing, and that filming would begin
in October 2018.
And now it’s complete. It will
be fascinating to see what Milch,
his co-creators, and the cast
have come up with to complete
the project they were forced to
abandon 12 years ago. The film
will take place 10 years after the
Season 3 finale and is set shortly
before South Dakota’s 1889
achievement of statehood and
the town of Deadwood’s final
transition from an illegal settle-
ment formed of a frantic gold
rush to a legal entity in the United
States.
While the resuscitation of
“Deadwood” has generated
widespread excitement, it also
comes alongside some unfor-
tunate news. Earlier this spring,
Milch announced that he’d been
diagnosed with Alzheimer’s dis-
ease, and now the “Deadwood”
movie is riven with a sense of
grief and a concern that it could
be the TV veteran’s swan song
not merely by choice but by
fate. Milch has said he intends
to continue writing through his
health difficulties, but he hasn’t
revealed any specific projects
yet.
Regardless of what the future
holds for the creator and cast of
“Deadwood: The Movie,” the film
itself will go down as an unlikely
bonanza for audiences who held
the original series dear and
lamented its abrupt termination
in the olden days of 2006. Those
audiences will be able to revisit
their temporarily lost, impossibly
resurrected favorite on Friday,
May 31, when “Deadwood: The
Movie” debuts on HBO.
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