In "Deadwood," which premieres Sunday night at 10, you will find the Western's conventional quest for gold nuggets, the faithful Doc, and the gambling saloon drunks knocking over chairs. But you'll also run across more expletive-spewing than a rabid Tony Soprano, foul pigs who dine on the town's latest unlucky guest, a sheriff who hangs a thief without a trial, and a population caked in vintage soot that's so oily you can almost smell it.
"Deadwood" stinks, which is one reason it's so good.
The show is the creation of David Milch, who gave us the envelope-pushing "NYPD Blue" back in the days when Janet Jackson was still dressing like the Music Man. And it makes the most of Milch's ability to turn raw American speech -- this time from 1876 -- into a kind of ungrammatical, Mamet-ian poetry.
It also showcases Milch's taste for complexity when it comes to both the criminal mind and the lawman's motivations.
Unhindered by network TV's decency standards and its obligation to simplify for the viewer, Milch presents the lawless town of Deadwood, S.D., in its full anarchic enormity, from the STDs and violence that plague the brothels to the laudanum habit that haunts the only aristocratic lady in town. With "Deadwood," Milch takes the license of HBO and rides happily into the West with it.
Deadwood was a real mining camp that sprang up in Indian territory when news of gold brought scrappy dreamers and fugitives willing to try their luck in places unregulated by US law. And Milch throws real characters such as Calamity Jane Cannary and Wild Bill Hickok into the Deadwood general population (which isn't unlike the riotous "genpop" on HBO's late prison drama, "Oz").
But Deadwood isn't a history lesson, and its realism is more stylistic than documentary. Keith Carradine's Wild Bill is a morose figure who's as weary and numb as Bill Murray's disenfranchised actor in "Lost in Translation."
He's just sliding by on his reputation as a gunfighter, using his celebrity to shill for saloon owners. And the childlike Jane (Robin Weigert) is his loyal subject, an emotional loose cannon with a whiskey-soaked noble streak. She's a long, long way from Doris Day.
