Deadwood

2 0 0 4 – 2 0 0 6 (USA)
36 x 60 minute episodes

HBO gave the Western a shot in the arm with Deadwood, reviving a tired TV genre.

Ian McShane and Timothy Olyphant led an excellent cast of morally grey characters searching for fortune and glory in the titular South Dakota town in the late 1800s – a lawless sinkhole of crime and corruption, built on land stolen from the Sioux Nation.

Saloon owner and incipient boss of Deadwood, Al Swearengen, was a gift of a character that put McShane (pictured at left) on the map for American audiences and continued HBO’s impressive run of creating groundbreaking television.

Swearengen and his henchmen formed the closest thing to a Western Mafia and contributed substantially to Deadwood’s lofty mortality rate.

Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant, pictured below right) was a principled former Montana marshal who arrived in Deadwood to open a hardware store but was reluctantly drawn back into wearing a badge as the town’s moral anchor.

HBO abruptly cancelled the series in 2006, largely because of immense production costs, averaging $4.5 million per episode, driven by highly intricate historical sets.

To resolve the unfinished storylines, HBO released Deadwood: The Movie on 31 May 2019.

Set ten years after the finale, during South Dakota’s 1889 statehood celebration, the film reunited the surviving cast to confront their pasts and bring the legendary saga a poetic sense of closure.

Al Swearengen
Ian McShane
Seth Bullock
Timothy Olyphant
Alma Garret
Molly Parker
Dan Dority
W. Earl Brown
Sol Star
John Hawkes
Doc Cochran
Brad Dourif
Charlie Utter
Dayton Callie
Trixie
Paula Malcomson
Tom Nuttall
Leon Rippy
E.B. Farnum
William Sanderson
Calamity Jane
Robin Weigert
Johnny Burns
Sean Bridgers
Sofia Metz
Bree Seanna Wall
Whitney Ellsworth
Jim Beaver
A.W. Merrick
Jeffrey Jones
Joanie Stubbs
Kim Dickens
Cy Tolliver
Powers Boothe
Silas Adams
Titus Welliver
Con Stapleton
Peter Jason
Martha Bullock
Anna Gunn
Leon
Larry Cedar
Jewel
Geri Jewell
Richardson
Ralph Richeson