June 28, 2024: WesternStudying: Deadwood and Justified

[75 yearsago this week, the firstnetwork TV Western, Hopalong Cassidy debuted. Fewgenres have been influential for longer or across more media, so this week I’llAmericanStudy Hopalong and other Westerns—add your responses &analyses in the comments, pardner!]

On what links twogreat (and very Western) TV shows, and what differentiates them.

If I’m tobelieve my usually reliable friends at the , Justified creator GrahamYost had no role in the production of DavidMilch’s groundbreaking and wonderful Deadwood (2004-06, & then anawesome 2019 movie). One reason for my disbelief is that in the course of its six-seasonrun Justified employed a very verylarge numberof Deadwood alums, not only star Timothy Olyphant (who played a U.S.Marshal in both shows) but also W. Earl Brown, Sean Bridgers, Jim Beaver, PeterJason, Garret Dillahunt, and Gerald McRaney (and that’s just the ones I knowfor sure). And it’s not just the common cast list that links the two shows: inthe opening seasons of both, Olyphant’s quick-draw and hot-tempered marshalcharacter arrives in town and develops an enduring love-hate dynamic with anespecially eloquent but dangerous local crime boss (with Ian McShane’s charismaticAl Swearengen serving as Deadwood’sequivalent of Boyd Crowder) while romancing a recent widow (with Molly Parker’sheadstrong Alma Garret as Deadwood’sequivalent of Ava Crowder). Even the fact that Deadwood is set in 1876 South Dakota, not early 21stcentury Kentucky, isn’t a big a distinction between the two shows as you mightthink, given the heavy emphasis throughout Justifiedon weddinga Wild West main character and tone to that contemporary setting andcontext.

The two showsare connected by more than just a stable of actors and a similar premise andgenre, however. Both, it seems to me, are fundamentally focused on questions ofcommunity and individual identity, and of whether and how each side of thatduality affects the other. While this is a reductive point in each case, itwould be possible to say that Deadwoodwas centrally about whether the town would become more Swearengen’s or SethBullock’s (Olyphant’s character), while Justifiedwas about whether Raylan’s or Boyd’s vision for Harlan’s future would cometo pass. At the same time, each setting was exerting its pull and influence onthe two men (and everyone else within its purview); the unofficial Justified anthem “You’ll Never Leave HarlanAlive” could just as easily substitute in “Deadwood” and work equally wellfor that setting and show. Similarly, characters like Ava and Alma offer achance to see how the same questions play out for a strong single woman, while Deadwood’s Chinese community boss Mr.Wu (Keone Young) parallels Justified’sLimehouse (Mykelti Williamson) as a complex and compelling spokesperson (if inWu’s case one who by choice doesn’t speak much English) for a powerful minoritycommunity in town. The more I write these first two paragraphs, the more I feelthat Yost learned a great deal from Milch’s show, and wedded those lessons toElmore Leonard’s novella to create the template for Justified’s setting and world.

There are ofcourse lots of differences between the shows as well, and I would highlight inparticular an overarching element of Deadwoodthat, perhaps, pushes that show into a stratosphere that the excellent Justified didn’t quite achieve. David Milch clearly believesthat what happened in Deadwood in 1876 and after represents no less than thebirth of the modern United States, and over the course of the show’s arc workedhard to suggest precisely that sort of symbolic change and growth beneath themuddy realities of his frontier town. Whether we agree or disagree with thatconcept—I find it echoes a bit too closely Frederick JacksonTurner’s Frontier Thesis, and would highlight a number of other nationalorigin points as more broadly representative than Deadwood—it reflects a levelof artistic and national ambition behind Deadwoodthat seems to me to have been present in only a handful of TV shows. Justified is much of the time a lessweighty pleasure, one with compelling stories to tell and an equally engrossingcommunity to create, but not quite as ambitious a sense of the symbolic valueof either those stories or that community. But as I hope this2017 blog series made abundantly clear, I very much love Justified for what it is, and wouldrecommend it to anyone for a binge-watching session.

June Recapthis weekend,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Westerns you’d analyze?