So I’ve listened to Bob Dylan’s latest effort Modern Times a couple times through. It’s good. It’s not great. However you felt about Love and Theft is a good indicator of how you’ll feel about Modern Times.

In fact, I mentioned to Andy that I thought you could probably throw the 22 tracks from both albums in a hat, randomly pull them out, and have two albums that sound pretty similar. This isn’t a plus in my book, and I’ll echo Andy’s initial lament: there aren’t any songs that truly rock. “Nettie Moore” is an early candidate for my favorite song.

So the season/series finale of Deadwood came and went on Sunday night. Season three finished filming before network in-fighting doomed the show so the ending was incomplete. There will be two, two-hour movies to cap off the show since nothing was resolved.

What can I say about this show? I’d take three seasons of Deadwood over six seasons of The Sopranos any day. The Sopranos‘ first two seasons were incredibly good; they’ve been living off their reputation ever since. In contrast, Deadwood has enjoyed three remarkably strong seasons without so much as a bad episode. True, some episodes clip along faster than others and some plot lines don’t advance the wider story much, but like I said: not a bad episode among them.

The real star of the show is Ian McShane as Al Swearengen. The first season set the series up as a morality play pitting the good (Timothy Olyphant as sherriff Seth Bullock) versus the evil, as personified as Swearengen. But it soon became clear that Swearengen/McShane was a far more fascinating character than Bullock/Olyphant. In truth, Olyphant has done only a serviceable job in his portrayal of Bullock, the sherriff prone to losing his cool. His simmering rage often comes across as constipation. McShane, however, has made Swearengen a character worthy of a spin-off show.

I’m eager to watch the first season again because I distinctly remember the “old” Al being much darker and crueller than the one we’ve seen in much of the second and third seasons. In those first episodes his mere presence freezes Calamity Jane, and his main scheme is the attempted murder the child Sophia. Season Two began with a brawl with Bullock that induced a stroke from which Al eventually recovers, but emerges as a somewhat changed man. I was glad to see the return of the “old” Al, the one capable of anything, for a brief moment in Season Three’s finale.

Another thing that the show does remarkably well is inventive use of soliloquy. Sometimes the plot gets so complex, the characters must to speak their thoughts so the viewer fully understands what’s going on. The potential for making this a disaster is huge but the show does it smoothly. We get Alma speaking her thoughts in pretext of conversation with Sophia as she combs the child’s hair; the opium-addicted Leon confronts his stoned reflection in a mud puddle; Swearengen schemes aloud as he’s serviced by one of his whores, or he addressses the boxed head of an indian chief as he strategizes; Ellsworth talks to his dog about his domestic arrangements. It’s all very natural, all very real when it could be so, so bad—like The Sopranos‘ now-tired use of the dream sequence; effective as minute-long vignettes expressing Tony’s guilt and self-doubt in the first two seasons, the idea bloated this last season in a dream sequence spanning episodes as Tony struggles to come out of a coma.

Deadwood‘s writing is snappy and clever (although sometimes anachronistic) and the characters multi-dimensional and interesting. The sub-plots are always worthwhile (although I do have to say I’m least interested in the whole business around the livery, Dan the drunk, and the ex-slave General Fields; and the episode with the Earp brothers felt forced) and even the minor characters are terrific: E.B. Farnum, Charlie Utter, Doc Cochran, and literally all the rest. If Deadwood has any true fault, it’s coming up with too many great characters for a one-hour show. As a result, some major characters (like Cy Tolliver played by Powers Boothe) got shunted to the side this season.

But Deadwood‘s race is almost run and I’ll be sad to see it go. From the opening episodes with Wild Bill Hickock to the final showdown with George Hearst, the show has kept me riveted to the tube every Sunday night. It gives me hope that such television exists, and the fact that its life was cut short is just another reminder that we all live in a sad, fallen world.

Current Mood: Tuesday, Not Friday |
Currently Listening To – Bob Dylan – “Modern Times”