True Grit

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Some of Deadwood's strongest insights are about the symbiosis between a racist society and the groups it despises. Take the camp's Chinese cook Wu (Keone Young), who is the butt of slant-eye jokes but has an indispensable role. When someone wants to keep a murder quiet, the corpse is fed — despite the cook's silent disgust — to Wu's pigs. (Which, yes, the townsfolk eat.) Even more essential are the Indians or, as they are dehumanizingly and incessantly called, "the godless heathen c__ksucker Sioux." Although it's two weeks after Custer's massacre at Little Bighorn, they don't appear, except as a constantly invoked and useful menace. Swearengen's road agents even scalp their victims to make it look like an Indian attack. You can't miss the post-9/11 point about the line between danger and exploitation. "An Indian was never seen in Deadwood alive," Milch says. "But if you keep people agitated, they'll drink more and they'll gamble more. So the deep thinkers — the guys who ran the saloons and the brothels — liked to keep people stirred up to the idea of an outside threat."

Milch knows a thing or two about the addict's mind-set. While studying and working at Yale in the '60s and '70s under literary giants Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, he says he led a double life as a heroin junkie and gambling addict before cleaning up and becoming a writer for Hill Street Blues. Addicts and gamblers, says Milch, have a "risk taker" personality — just like prospectors, which is why so few of them got rich and so many saloonkeepers did. Says director-producer Davis Guggenheim: Milch has "something most people with intellect don't have — very colorful life experiences."

The writer puts both intellect and experience to good use, especially in Deadwood's dialogue, which is vulgar but well crafted, even oddly formal. ("If you're going to murder me, I'd appreciate a quick dying. And not getting et by the pigs. In case there is resurrection of the flesh.") As with NYPD Blue's mannered police slanguage — or, for that matter, iambic pentameter — no human speaks this way. But the writing does what good dialogue should, which is firmly establish its own world and its own logic.

Deadwood is not the next Sopranos. Everyone likes Italian food, whereas this is beef jerky — slow chewing, an acquired taste but substantial. Sometimes Milch's Shakespearean ambitions get away from him, and the story can drag. But the acting is strong, especially Carradine's leonine, sad gunslinger, who asks his handlers, "Can you let me go to hell the way I want to?" Then there's Doc Cochran (Brad Dourif), the town's physician and its secret keeper — he inspects Swearengen's whores, covers up cases of smallpox, ignores evidence of murder under duress and hides a young girl who witnessed the road agents' massacre — and the pressure has him wound like a watch spring. The best moments in Deadwood happen at the margins, not in gunfights but in the pig pens and doctor's office, as we discover the ecology of this nascent community. It's worth a visit. Just so long as you don't mind getting a mite dirty.