It's beautiful, it's about something *and* it's entertaining.
Every line of dialogue is delightful. It has this lyrical, rhythmic quality to it and sometimes character go into full-on Shakespearean soliloquies without, somehow, that feeling jarring.
And it's very much about what it means to be a social creature and the striving to have a society and what that means, how things become imbued with shared meaning, and how it affects people.
And it's *funny*. But not in a way that can be explained or recounted cos it emerges so much from character and situation.
I fucking love it.
Only downside is that it ends without a conclusion, cancelled after series 3. Which I'm okay with, there was no mystery to resolve or particular narrative arc to conclude, it's so much about the ongoing process of birthing a society that I can just imagine that continuing without me and be content.
There is a movie, which probably felt different for those who were waiting *years* for more than it did to me who watched it immediately after the last episode. For them I'm sure it was a long-awaited revisit. For me it was just a gentle epilogue. It lacked the pith and fire of the show but was a nice goodbye to beloved characters.
Bear in mind I was 10 years old and it was in that category of boring sunday evening TV for old people that my parents would put on. I actually avoided things with Ian McShane in for years after cos I assumed he was a terrible actor cos he was in Lovejoy.
It was better than Heartbeat though. And that detective show with that annoying curly haired fuck and a miserable woman.
And yes, it was better than Heartbeat which was a show for people who sit around feeling nostalgic for Izal toilet paper - because Izal isn't woke.
As for the curly-haired detective and miserable woman. No idea. Unless you mean Dempsey and Makepeace although he didn't have curly hair and I don't think I ever watched one. Jonathan Creek? That was years later.
I was also late to the Deadwood party, although it was between the series and the movie so experienced most of the wait inbetwixt.
Going through a Western phase at the moment but have put off rewatching it so I can make some progress with Gunsmoke instead. Did listen to the soundtrack this week and now you are definitely motivating me to watch it again.
(also thanks Milko for the original recommendation)
I always thought I liked Dempsey and Makepeace but I think it's just cos it had a cool theme. The show itself would always disappoint. TJ Hooker though, that was the shit.
And yeah, Jonathan Creek. Much later but same dull as fuck middle england vibe.
That's interesting. There's a whole batch of those: Death in Paradise, Midsummer Murders, Jonathan Creek etc. with more starting up all the time. Usually people assume that because there's a superficial similarity to Agatha Christie's books, that she's pretty much the same. Considering that her writing is usually adapted and presented in a comfortable middle brow, Middle-England way* that's not surprising. But it's not the whole picture. A few years ago, I bought my mum all of the Agatha Christie books as a birthday present, and then read them myself when I visited her. There's a reason she succeeded. She's a really good writer. Also, her work is far more insightful and nuanced than the stuff churned out for most telly whodunnits. Most important, she doesn't have a casual attitude to death. In most TV stuff, the meat of the story is the 'how' and the 'who'. There's usually a nod to the deceased as a human, but only because the 'why' helps with the other components. In her writing, the moral impact of a death is (usually) front and centre.
*I do think that Hercule Poirot was nicely portrayed with all his modern-man 1920s habits in the David Suchet version, although I prefer the radio adaptations.
Yeah, that's them. I get why that stuff is made - it's switch your brain off and relax stuff, which is fine, I have my own versions of that.
I only learned fairly recently that Agatha Christie is actually a *good writer*. Which you'd never really guess from most of the TV stuff. I read a bit of her stuff and it's not for me but yeah she could certainly write good.
And I did always enjoy a Poirot when one came on.
What you're saying about the moral weight of the murder makes me think of the transition from hardboiled/film noir style crime drama to the police procedural. Which I've been learning a bit about recently.
In the 30s-50s, TV/film crime drama tended to frame crime as a social problem rather than as individual pathology. The criminals were often sympathetically drawn, you'd get a lot of time from their point of view, they were normal people pushed to extremes by circumstance rather than bad people looking for an opportunity to be bad. And the cop's, who's explicitly from the same social class as the criminals, job was kinda moral arbitration rather than straight up law enforcement.
Then the McCarthy Witch Hunts happened and anyone with even a vaguely social-construction take on crime was booted out of media production and the police procedural took over. Very much from the cop's point of view, very much crime as pathology and cop as unambiguous hero.
(The Wire gets a lot of credit for flipping that a bit but honestly I think it's mostly undeserved. The extent to which it depicted crime as a social problem is hugely overstated (as is its quality imo). It spent a *tiny* bit more time with the criminals than the norm but that seemed more in service of making them compelling villains than in humanising them, to me.)
every time I see a Deadwood mention, I go looking up quotes. Such good TV, such great characters. I could listen to Swearengen, EB Farnum, Jane, and the Doc's lines so happily. No doubt forgetting some others as well.
Yeah the movie was exactly as you describe, a sweet little epilogue really, a nice way to check in on survivors and whatnot but not essential to it at all.
I adored Jane. There's a bit where she and Charlie meet up and talk to Bill's grave and it's so fucking sweet and tragic and also funny. I think Jane and Charlie are the characters I felt the most affection for.
But EB Farnham! That fucking performance. Making that character *work* is incredible. Not evil, just *disgusting* (a "grotesque"). And yet still somehow kinda loveable through it all.
