Trying to get involved in Deadwood (series) but it's not easy

Deadwood is one of those shows that a lot of people will tell you is absolutely amazing and one of those "must watch" sorts of things. I have tried in the past on several occasions to get into it and failed. I have at one point or another owned a DVD set of the first season and it appealed to me so little that I don't even know what happened to them. I must have loaned them out to someone else and then forgot about them and I wasn't concerned enough about it to figure out where they went.

Whoever borrowed those from me and didn't return them, I hope you enjoyed it a great deal more than I did. Or maybe you ended up feeling the same way I did about it and that's why you too, probably forgot you even had them.

Who knows.

I started to watch this again because it has been on my group's server for quite some time and I am now at a point where I'm not really digging any of the new series and I am mostly watching Deadwood before I get back into House of the Dragon to refresh my memory before the new season drops later this month.

Let's dig into what I think Deadwood kind of suffers from, and how I think I will most likely fail yet again at trying to watch it this time around as well.

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It's hard to imagine this and it makes me feel old but this much lauded series is more than 20 years old. Westerns are a tough sell in the entertainment marketplace but they managed to do so with this one and they probably ended up winning some awards because of it.

Deadwood is set in the 1870's in South Dakota before the area had truly been governed. The area is presented as being rather lawless and there are no authority figures that are officials of the USA at the time. Society is run by whoever has the guts to try to rule and while it is a work of fiction, it is meant to be based at least to some degree on actual happenings during that time. I'm not going to look into the authenticity of these claims.

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Even if you haven't seen the show you probably recognize Ian McShane as one of the main characters. He is presented very early on as being a corrupt and rather evil leader of Deadwood, Al Swearengen. This much I know is true in that Al was a real person and was notorious for being cutthroat and business savvy. He keeps his friends close and his enemies closer and has his dirty little fingers in a lot of dirty pies. He will lie, cheat, steal, and murder his way to keeping his power and mostly he is quite reviled yet respected and feared by the residents of Deadwood.

Much of what I have seen and can remember about having watched this show in the past revolves around him. Other characters come and go and there are some real historical figures that pop in that most people would at least recognize the names of such as Wild Bill Hickock and Wyatt Earp. The writers took a lot of liberty in writing their involvement in the city and it is understandable why they would have to do that because there isn't going to be a lot of records about a city that wasn't even governed for a long time.

But let's get into what I like about this series and what I do not like.

Pro: Beautiful and authentic looking sets

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Rebuilding a city based on a couple of very blurry photographs and really old drawings of a city that had no law can't be easy and now you have to do it while attempting to make it look authentic to the time period in question all while doing so with modern actual equipment. This is a very tough thing to do in movies or shows and I have first-hand experience in how hard this can be and how there is a relative army of people that work only on ensuring that there are no accidental modern things like wrist-watches or Starbucks cups in any scene.

I actively search for things like this but even when you check exhaustive lists online there are not many mistakes the likes of how there is an airplane flying overhead in Troy and the famous Starbucks coffee cup that appears in Game of Thrones.

The dusty and old timey feel of the show is really well done and I would imagine that there was plenty of complaining going on by the people that were involved in the making of this series. I'll give credit where it is due and they did a fantastic job of this.

Con: The story moves alarmingly slow

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Shows can all be shootouts and explosions, this much I know. But in the case of Deadwood the first 4 episodes almost nothing happens at all. I have been told by people that love the show that you have to endure this, but then things get a lot better with plenty of surprises mixed in if you can tough it out until later. I'm currently really struggling to make this happen because I know that the slew of characters are so widespread that just a little bit of Instagramming while it is on is going to result in me missing some very crucial information that will be very important later on.

I seriously struggle to say focused while watching this show and have to find other things to do in the same room like laundry or doing some sit ups or something like that to pass the time. Each episode is about an hour and multiple times I have pushed the button to see how much time is left and honestly, I sometimes just wish they would fucking get on with it already.

There's 12 episode in each of the 3 seasons as well as a film that I have also not seen. I am very hopeful that it will "pick up" soon and I am reminded how I initially gave up on Game of Thrones for the same reason but a friend basically begged me to continue. It now is one of my favorite series of all time so I am hopeful that Deadwood can somehow end up being the same.

Con: Super long intro

This intro has a nice song, and I enjoyed it the first 2 or 3 times I saw it but at nearly 2 minutes long I feel as though this really shouldn't have been that way. This is a true sign of the times though because it seems to me that only recently did people start to get so impatient. Perhaps a 2 minute intro was just normal back then, or a super long one, like this, was a sign of how great the production actually was.

For me, the intro of Breaking Bad kind of flipped everything because that intro was just a few seconds long and to me, that was perfect.

My setup doesn't allow me to automatically skip an intro so I often have to just guess whether or not I skipped too much. Deadwood's first couple of minutes of every episode thus far has just been establishing shots, so up to now my trigger happy skipping of many minutes hasn't resulted in me ruining any crucial moments of the show, and this is probably just lucky.

Pro: Very good actors

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There are so many good actors in this show that no matter who they are focusing on, they are probably going to be putting on a very high level of performance. There are a few exceptions such as "Calamity Jane" but her being annoying might have been intentional and actress Robin Weigert may have done such a good job that we were maybe meant to be annoyed by her.

I mistakenly thought that the actor playing Wild Bill Hickok was Hugh Laurie from House but it is actually someone named Keith Carradine, who I am actually not very familiar with.

Anyway, this series doesn't suffer from any bad acting. They absolutely nailed that side of things, even with the few child actors and that is something I am normally very picky about.

I am not one to really tolerate stories that move exceptionally slow. I will admit that much like almost anyone else on planet Earth, the availability of internet all over the place has kind of drastically reduced my attention span.

I'm going to stick this one out at least for the first season though. Finally something really interesting happened with the death of a character that they had set up as being central and it kind of reminded me of when they offed Ned Stark in the first season of Game of Thrones. I had not read the book at that point in my life yet, so that really caught me off guard. The fact that they would do this so early on in Deadwood has me believing that there could be some wonderfully unpredictable things to come. For that reason alone, I am going to keep going even though at least at 5 episodes in, I feel as though it is quite an accomplishment to just pay attention for an hour in a row.

If you have watched Deadwood and enjoyed it, let me know in the comments below!