David Milch makes people arguing over how to live together worth hours of our attention. His elaborate, profane dialogue can become a nuisance, but Deadwood earns our patience and our strong recommendation.
Fi1m perspective
In Deadwood (2004), people swear, argue and produce elaborate speeches while trying to live together in a lawless camp. David Milch and his fellow writers make the attempts to establish order as absorbing as the violence. We were gripped by those disputes because even a promise of improvement makes us ask who will be paying for it. The series lets us understand competing interests without requiring us to like everyone involved. It is superb television, including for those of us with little appetite for Westerns.
He wrote for Hill Street Blues (1981) before co-creating NYPD Blue (1993) with Steven Bochco. Those police dramas gave him room to develop characters over time, through their dealings with one another. In Deadwood, he takes that interest into a place where the rules have yet to be agreed. The pleasure is in watching people learn what they must tolerate, and what they can reasonably expect, if they are going to stay.
His method includes dictating scenes and refining their rhythms through repetition, which helps explain the care audible in the dialogue. Ian McShane's Al Swearengen is an extraordinary match for writing that asks so much of the actor speaking it. There are passages, though, where we start listening to the phrasing and stop attending to the person. Profanity can become equally tiresome when there is too much of it. The opening stretch asks for patience, but once the ensemble settles, those irritations diminish and the series more than repays the effort.
John from Cincinnati (2007) and the horse-racing series Luck (2011) each lasted one season; Milch later wrote the Deadwood film (2019). His later series have drawn complaints of obscurity, a risk we can recognise when the speeches in Deadwood become too elaborate. We do not need every sentence to be easy, but we do need to know why a person is saying it. Begin with Deadwood, and save it for an evening when there is time to listen.
Biography
David Sanford Milch is an American television writer and producer. He was born on 23 March 1945 in Buffalo, New York. He graduated summa cum laude from Yale University and earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. He began his television career writing for Hill Street Blues in 1982.
Milch co-created NYPD Blue (1993) with Steven Bochco and created the HBO series Deadwood (2004). He also wrote for True Detective (2014) and Luck (2012), and wrote the 2019 film Deadwood: The Movie. He has been married to Rita Stern since 1982.
