Deadwood

MrWrite said:

I'm watching Deadwood for the first time I taped it lasy night on HBO. One thing strikes me within the first ten minutes. The amount of cursing in it especially the F word.
Now, I'm no prude and have been known to utter the odd word myself but the amount of cursing on this show seems just ludicrous. The characters can't seem to utter one sentence without peppering it with F words. Even as I'm typing this I've heard the word used 3 times! LOL. Now I know the real cowboys were probably prone to cussing and didn't go around saying "goshdarn it" all the time, but the amount of cursing on this show seems ridiculously over the top. Even a man telling a woman to sign something or he'll "blow her F'ing head off." I was always under the impression most men showed women a lot more respect, probably more than women get shown these days.
I was wondering what you all think of it.

Click to expand...

Don't watch all the episodes of Deadwood back to back or you'll end up with a mouth like a sailor. I speak from experience.

First let me say that I love dead wood and second let me say that in my youth and as an over the road truck driver i wasn't terribly offended by the language, actually, and this i'm sure will be argued, the script writing is almost poetic in its use of the vulgar language which i have read in historic pieces is fairly accurate for the time.

I netflixed the first season.

While I didn't find the langauage all that notable (having worked four years with the military I don't even notice the F word anymore), the unrelenting violence and bleak atmosphere was both disturbing and depressing to me.

I had intended to watch the entire series, but the longer I wait, the less inclined I am. I loved the Calamity Jane character. On the first disc they had the actress who played her do some comentary with the actor who plays the doc. That was pretty interesting~

I am quite a fan of the series personally, though I have yet to watch a full season as it keeps jumping times and channels. I think the profanity is way over the top in the first few episodes because they were really trying to establish a tone. Man did they succeed. After that, the profanity relaxes a bit, it's still there, but less.

As to the man cussing out the woman and men showing a lot more respect in those days, I think the point is that in Deadwood, women are commodities. This is a mining town, not a city. A place where men go to make their fortunes and then leave. Now you have a few business owners, including the appropriately named Swearengen, who is not only a pub owner, but a whoremaster. To him women are bought and sold, they are little more than objects. Thus he, and the other men, treat them pretty horribly. On the other hand we have Alma Garret, who is the wife of a middle class gentleman who joins him in his search for fortune. She is treated with far more respect, at least to her face, in the town. She is a "lady" and therefore the men will offer her a seat, and try to watch their language in front of her. However they still will get upset with her, and in an attempt to frighten her, treat her pretty poorly at times as well.

However I am afraid it is simply just incorrect that men were more respectful of women in the past than they are now. The ironic thing about the past is while there was an illusion that men treated women like ladies, often they were condescended to and treated with brutal violence. They were treated with "respect", because men thought they were frail creatures that couldn't get by without them. Women's voices didn't matter, they were considered too stupid to be given the right to vote. Divorce wasn't an option, so women were trapped into abusive relationships, what's more, there were very few professions a woman could do and so even if she did leave her husband how would she survive financially? Women weren't even considered "persons" under the law until the 20th century. As with any time there were good guys and bad guys, and men who truly did respect women. But I thank my lucky stars every day that I was born in this time, than any other century. Heck, than any other decade.

My thoughts, in summary:

I was a great fan of the series. I watched all the episodes multiple times, usually many times, except for the last episode, which I found to be too bleak and disappointing. I only watched it once, I think.

The use of the F-word was way over the top. It was one of the worst aspects of the show. I was not opposed to its use, just to its overuse.

I knew the series backwards and forwards. After season two, before we knew what would happen in season three, I wrote a Deadwood script to submit to the Austin Film Festival. Of course, it went absolutely nowhere in the competition. It was actually a fairly decent script, in view of the fact that I wrote it in a couple of weeks and had no idea of the storyline that the upcoming season would follow. So I came up with a couple of "directions" to go in that I thought would work (though the third season was different from what I had imagined). One thing I learned from the experience was that, in submitting to a competition, one should not write a script for a show that may not be all that popular, that requires readers to have an extensive knowledge of the storylines, and that uses a style that is at times poetic and rhapsodic and may strike the uninitiated as just plain bizarre. By the way, I went back and ran a search for words in my 57-page Final Draft script. I used the F-word four times; the P-word (for vagina) three times; and "damn" or some form of it three times. Not very filthy compared to the average episode.

The Deadwood characters were colorful and memorable. Trixie was delightful (and really hot!). Swearengen was unforgettable. Cy Tolliver was one of the most contemptible villains that I have ever seen in a television series.

My greatest objection to the show, after the excessive vulgarity, was the direction that the third season took. In my opinion, the George Hearst character, presented as an omnipotent demigod, ruined the dynamics of the myth that the series had created in the first two seasons.

I wish that the producer had handled the George Hearst storyline differently and had carried the series on for a final fourth season.

WU
Swedgin.

SWEARENGEN
Shut up, Wu.

Click to expand...

Yes, it was fun while it lasted.

I tried watching it a few times, but the mindless violence and gutter language was too much. No, I'm not prudish. I served 24 years in the military, but I never heard a constant stream of cursing like that. I won't waste my time listening to it.

I LOVED this series.

Yeah, they curse a lot. It's the Old West. It wasn't exactly family friendly. Eh. I could live with that.

There's such a cadence to the dialogue that's so fitting for the stories and the characters. I have a tendency to fall in love with television shows for their dialogue (i.e., The West Wing, Firefly, Deadwood, and a few others). There's no quantifiable measure of this....but when the dialogue fits the characters, the setting, the plot and etc., I'll watch for hours.

And Wu and Swedgin cracked me up.

I'm a big fan of the series. Keep in mind that the town of Deadwood was a truly lawless place that attracted the dregs of society. So there's some justification for the amount of profanity.

The dialog and language used in the show, profane and otherwise, has a classic quality. Shakespeare in the mud. EB's soliloquys, Swearingen and the severed Indian chief's head he keeps in the box (alas! poor Yorick!) Them words are just plain tasty.

Miss that show.

I love that phrase. Shakespeare in the mud. It's so fitting!

The actor who played Swearengen was on Bill Maher's show on HBO a few years ago. The actor referred to Deadwood as "Shakespeare on the plains."

MrWrite,

I think you will really like the first two seasons also.

I just tune out all the f-bombs.

The "spoiler alert"

For those who don't know ... MrWrite issued a spoiler alert above. To see the spoiler, which is in white letters, you need to highlight the text after "spoiler alert." I was completely perplexed at first!

And I completely agree with you, MrWrite!

I was a great fan of the series. I watched all the episodes multiple times, usually many times, except for the last episode, which I found to be too bleak and disappointing. I only watched it once, I think.

Click to expand...

I love the series. I was also at first disappointed with the ending until I realized that it was intentional and true and that all the themes led the audience there. Swearengen's last words are, I think, "He wants me to tell em something pretty". And I realized that he wasn't talking about Johnny, but about the audience. We wanted a pretty ending, but, as we know, the ending was what it was.

AMC

Last episode

The actual title of the final episode is "Tell Him Something Pretty."

See the HBO Episode Guide for Deadwood.

Personally, I think the series creator had run out of steam and just wanted to wind things up.

Wasn't is canceled?

It was originally planned for four seasons I believe. The original town of Deadwood eventually burned down and I suspect that the fire would have been the centrepiece of the final season. There are some potential clues about that salted in the script.