Lambie Reviews: Season One of Deadwood

If you look up any description of Deadwood, it will usually detail something about how it's a fictionalised account of the inhabitants of Deadwood when it was still a lawless camp that thrived on the nearby gold deposits during the gold rush, and this description will always be accompanied by universal praise. People everywhere say it's one of the best television series ever made. But are they right?

Sort of.

In terms of technical production, Deadwood does everything right. The opening titles sequence sets the tone of the entire series, the characters are all three dimensional and well fleshed out (probably because most of them are actually based on real people who lived in the real Deadwood at the time), the settlement of Deadwood looks and feels like a lawless "wild West" gold rush town, and the plots can become very intriguing. But it's in this last point that a major problem can lie.

You will notice that I didn't use "plot", but rather the plural "plots". The major flaw of Deadwood, I found, is that while the first few episodes introduce the main characters, set the tone, etc, and on the whole could generally be described as "awesome", the next few episodes introduce even more characters. And they all pretty much have "main character" status in terms of plot developement.

Now, this would be fine if they were all involved in one or two of the major plots, but they aren't. At any given time there can be at least three or four different things going on, and the show has to cut between them all and cover them equally because they're all treated as major plotlines and not really as subplots. While it doesn't necessarily make things hard to follow at first, a few things start cropping up that you need to remember a few episodes down the track, but you can't because you were too busy paying attention to all the other storylines.

There are so many storylines that some only get a couple of scenes in an episode, some seem to dissapear for a few episodes before coming back, and some just seem to end abruptly without really going anywhere and getting developed properly. (Bill Hickok's sudden murder a couple of episodes in is excusable, because that really happened).

On the one hand it's a real pity, because some of the characters and their associated stories could have been developed into intriguing subplots. On the other hand, it'd be even more plot threads to trawl through and have to remember. (And in Bill Hickok's hand when he was murdered was what has become the modern day Dead Man's Hand in poker, if you didn't know where it came from already. Sorry, I couldn't resist.)

So does all this mean that it's a bad series and that everyone was lying for saying it was good? Not at all. The critical acclaim is well deserved. If the only downside to a series is that some people won't enjoy the fact that lots of stories are being told at once at a rather slow pace, then I think the series is still doing pretty well for itself. If you don't mind that sort of thing, with the occasional violence and frequent swearing thrown in ("frequent" is an understatement, by the way), then Deadwood is for you.