We're celebrating this stellar series with these behind-the-scenes details that will deepen your appreciation of all things Seth Bullock and Al Swearengen. Established in , this location has been the backdrop to a long legacy of Westerns. In the s, Deadwood, South Dakota was a place full of criminals and entrepreneurs.
Series creator David Milch rigorously researched the real Deadwood by reading its newspapers, the diaries of its residents, and formal historical accounts like Black Hills expert Watson Parker's Deadwood: The Golden Years.
Farnum, A. Merrick, Charlie Utter, and George Hearst were all real people with noted moments in history, too. However, characters like Trixie, Whitney Ellsworth, and Alma Garret were largely fictional, based more on archetypes of people who would've had a place in Deadwood.
He invested in the community, headed health care boards, and became the town's first sheriff. That last vocation earned him the aforementioned reputation, which endeared him to Theodore Roosevelt, whom Bullock later successfully helped campaign for the presidency of the United States.
The Chicago Tribune later ran a delightful description of Bullock: "Bullock attracted general attention around the White House today. He has a fierce looking melodrama-villain's mustache and wears a sombrero. In Deadwood , Ian McShane's Al Swearengen is a pimp, crook, and murderer, but he is also the protector of the "crippled" Jewel and grimly civic-minded.
The real Swearengen was much less admirable. He was a sex trafficker, tricking women into coming to Deadwood to work in his various business ventures—like a theater—but then forcing them into prostitution. His wife publicly accused him of domestic abuse. Eventually, he was run out of Deadwood and died of a massive head wound that was either caused by a fall from a failed leap onto a freight train or a willful act of murder.
Milch was convinced Ian McShane would be miscast as Swearengen. I didn't even want to read him. I had imagined Swearengen as a physically imposing specimen. But when Ian came in, he neutralized all of that, because he had Swearengen's essence, which was fierce matter-of-factness. He was who he was, unadulterated. George Hearst who is played by Gerald McRaney in the series was a self-made man who had a real gift for mining gold.
The series painted him as a robber baron whose gold lust threatened Deadwood's existence. But there was much more to Hearst. He was raised on his parents' farm in Franklin County, Missouri, but left their homestead to join the Gold Rush in He made his first million in the Comstock Lode in Nevada, and after his dealings in Deadwood, he went on to become a senator.
Described as a "plain old Missourian, of small education and no polish of manners" by Cosmopolitan in , Hearst purchased The San Francisco Daily Examiner in , and a new family business was born seven years later when he handed the reins to his only son, William Randolph Hearst.
In season one, smallpox hits Deadwood and Doc and Jane see to the afflicted. This generous action has been historically documented, along with Jane's trademark rough-and-tumble appearance. Martha Canary :. She wore a dark cloth coat that never had been good, a cheap little hat, a faded frayed skirt and arctic overshoes … She came unscathed through the long smallpox siege and most of her patients lived. Babcock believed that without her care not one of them would have pulled through.
It's suspected that their connection has been conflated over the years as a part of the blossoming tall tales of the Old West. The pair did come to Deadwood together, but hadn't known each other long before that. However, in her memoir, Jane did describe him as a friend.
And the two, who died nearly 30 years apart, were buried beside each other in Deadwood's Mount Moriah Cemetery. This made him a recurring figure in the local newspapers like the Black Hills Pioneer, where he was described as "irrepressible, duplicatory, candescent," "the 'slycoon' senegambian ," and "The Shakespearian Darkey.
Despite the critical praise and awards attention from the Emmys and Golden Globes, it never exactly pulled in Game of Thrones - style numbers. The first season of Deadwood averaged a respectable 4. A downward ratings trajectory makes an early cancellation inevitable. Every episode of Deadwood was densely packed with inscrutable characters and complicated dialogue.
Deadwood was already a difficult show to make, even before creator David Milch's tendency toward last-minute rewrites. Timothy Olyphant told the audience at Film Independent Presents' "An Evening with Deadwood " via IndieWire about the time Milch came to him in his trailer to tell him that he'd just decided to kill off Bullock's nephew Ian McShane remembers complete rewrites coming in so late that the pages still bore the warmth of the copy machine.
More takes means more money, and Deadwood wasn't a cheap show to begin with, on account of its ultra-realistic re-creation of 19th century Deadwood, South Dakota, and everything in it. It must have been hard for HBO to justify keeping Deadwood around when it didn't bring in huge ratings. Long before the era of Peak TV brought high-quality content to most every cable network and streaming service, HBO held itself up as the home of prestige television.
In the mids, the flavor of HBO was solidly hip, envelope-pushing shows set in the present day. But among those shows about cranky TV writers, deluded actresses, cranky British actors, depressed mob bosses, and plural marriage sat Deadwood, an often brutal, slow-moving Western where the characters talked like they were doing Shakespeare when they weren't swearing.
Deadwood was an anomaly on HBO's schedule — it was simply too weird to live. While Deadwood was never a ratings smash — with fewer and fewer viewers over time — casting directors and the people who make movies and TV shows were among those aware of Deadwood and its talented ensemble cast.
By the time of the show's third season in , many Deadwood performers were already looking to move on to other roles and other challenges. For many parties, Deadwood 's cancellation was well-timed. It was the victim of corporate fighting.
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