Shakespeare in the mud

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One of the upsides to having the flu is that you can give yourself permission to stay home, lie on the couch and watch DVDs. Quite serendipitously, when I became sick towards the end of last week I happened to have a library copy of the second season of Deadwood at hand.

The title of this post comes from the description of Deadwood offered by Tim Goodman in an article in the San Francisco Chronicle:

This is Shakespeare in the mud, a labor-intensive aural pleasure that is gilded with excessive violence, an unholy amount of swearing and a lawless machismo that will send the faint of heart or the politically correct reeling.

As you can see from this quotation, Deadwood is something of an acquired taste. The show tracks the development of Deadwood, South Dakota as it rises out of the mud as a lawless frontier mining camp and goes on to a become a civilised town with laws and an economy in place.

When I first started to watch the first season earlier this year it took me a while to get my bearings, there is so much going on and nothing is overtly explained or signaled. The dialogue is quaint and vulgar (much has been made of the high swear-word-count in reviews of the program) but often cleverly ironic: 

Separate rooms, I’ll arrange that by tomorrow, but today I can’t fix it, unless you kill a guest.

And slowly the language and complex plotting creep up on you and hook you in …

I think one of the reasons Deadwood works for me is that it offers what Steven Johnson terms a ‘cognitive workout’. In his New York Times article ‘Watching TV Makes You Smarter’, Johnson argues:

Think of the cognitive benefits conventionally ascribed to reading: attention, patience, retention, the parsing of narrative threads. Over the last half-century, programming on TV has increased the demands it places on precisely these mental faculties.

Johnson’s article is an interesting read and although Deadwood isn’t used as an example it fits his definition. Deadwood is demanding and addictive television viewing and well worth the challenge if you don’t mind getting a little muddy in the process.

Image credit: Home Box Office

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