A soap opera (but with a bullet!)
Paraphrasing wikipedia “A soap opera is an ongoing, episodic work of fiction… with an open-ended narrative often following the lives of a group of characters who live or work in a particular place.”
For many of us, soap can become cliched and dramatically unengaging ... On those occasions when a soap genuinely does rise above its own premise and engage you dramatically, it's almost always down to the quality of the writing.
And so it is with Deadwood. I missed it the first time around and had heard rumours of its dark qualities for some time so I got the first series on DVD to see what all the fuss was about. HBO have been changing the definition of what constitutes good television drama for a number of years now and Deadwood continues this tradition. It is extraordinary. The single darkest and most savagely compelling piece of dramatic television I have ever seen. And essentially it’s a soap! Storylines weave through several episodes, the focus shifts from character to character, there are no easy resolutions and the pace is pedestrian but you are drawn inexorably into the impossibly corrupt world of this fledgling community on the edge of civilisation.
The phenomenal amount of swearing and violence may not be to everyone’s tastes, and there are occasions when it can be difficult to watch, but I cannot remember seeing anything so magnetic, brutal and honest in a long time. Ian McShane is clearly having the time of his life trashing his Lovejoy past in the character of the intensely charismatic but utterly amoral Al Swearengen. He even manages to beat Malcolm from the Thick of It for the most inventive swearer ever on the small screen and his savage humour flashes across the darkest of episodes. This incessant darkness makes the occasional glimpse of warmth and humanity that breaks through all the more beautiful however and there are moments that will touch the hardest of hearts.
The show’s creator and chief writer David Milch (who also created NYPD Blue with Steven Bochco) has clearly assembled a superb team of writers and the coruscating scripts and superbly defined characters barely miss a beat. I cannot wait to get stuck into season 2 and would recommend this to anyone who wants to see what a soap opera can really achieve.
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