It takes a mother lode of confidence for TV writers to focus the second season of a popular drama on the extraction of a villain’s kidney stones with what looks like a bent coathanger.
Thankfully, “Deadwood” produces nugget after nugget of rich material whether creator David Milch chooses to explore the physical or mental depths of his frontier characters.
With the HBO series about to launch Season 3 on June 11, Season 2 arrives in a DVD boxed set nearly a year after cablecast. The hour-long episodes are supreme entertainment – more honest about the human psyche than anything else on TV, and more engrossing than nine out of 10 movies made for theatrical release.
Season two’s DVDs, listed at $100 retail but available for as little as $63, are coveted by the rabid fans of “Deadwood.” Season three is likely to be the last, given HBO’s refusal to commit to a fourth, and none of the show’s addicts are easily separated from the edgy comic-drama about life in 1870s South Dakota.
“I feel like the second season of the show took the already good foundation laid in the first season and just blew the doors off,” said Allison Lowe, who writes up “Deadwood” plot summaries and monitors fan forums on the website TelevisionWithoutPity.com. “When I go back and look at what they did in 12 episodes, I am amazed,” she said.
“Deadwood” doesn’t even fit with the customarily snarky discussions on the website, Lowe said, “because everyone likes it so much. From what I can tell, the devotion of the fans only grew in the second season.”
“Deadwood” follows a dozen-odd characters in an ambitious, festering and paranoid gold camp. The most dynamic personalities are villains running rival saloons and brothels, Al Swearengen (Ian McShane) and Cy Tolliver (Powers Boothe). Their murderous – and unbelievably profane – plots to grab more power are occasionally balanced by relatively decent sheriff Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant) and a weary doctor (Brad Dourif).
The strength of “Deadwood,” though, is the unpredictability of its finely drawn characters. Just when you’ve had enough of Dirty Al’s tirades, he spares an enemy. And just when we’re most skeptical of the tight-lipped sheriff’s stoic moralizing, he enjoys some sweaty sex with a woman whose name is not engraved on his wedding ring.
What “Deadwood” makes into drama, no one else even attempts. The climax of the first four episodes of season two is that extremely crude kidney stone operation on tyrant Al. His henchmen (and women) slowly gather around his filthy saloon-top bedroom to aid their stricken paterfamilias, and soon the bewildering motivations of a good half-dozen characters suddenly seem more clear.
The boxed set includes valuable extras analyzing the writing of key scenes.
Lowe calls McShane perhaps the best TV bad guy of all time. “Showing his humanity, however limited, made him even scarier. I just find him riveting,” she said.
Staff writer Michael Booth can be reached at mbooth@denverpost.com
