Introduction

Ian McShane's first scene as Al Swearengen in Deadwood. 

This is an interesting endeavor--possibly re-watching Season One of Deadwood, approximately a decade after I first watched it. What I remember about it is hard to say--I just watched the first 20 minutes of Episode One, and so that triggered a few things.

I remember the Timothy Olyphant character Seth Bullock, and I got to see him introduced in his last act as Marshal of some other small town--he hangs a man while putting off the drunken citizens who want to do the killing themselves. Then he and his brother skip town to head off to Deadwood.

The only other people we meet before we get to Deadwood are Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane. These are, perhaps you're aware, actual historical figures, being fictionalized for this show--interestingly so, since they are emphatically not main characters--but rather peripheral, at least in my memory. Wild Bill I think dies halfway through Season One (I could be wrong) and he is survived by Calamity and by Charlie Utter.

Meanwhile, I remember Bullock eventually having a romance with this gorgeous woman who spends most of the show peaking from behind the curtains of her second-story room ... I think during the first half of the first season she is stuck with a loser husband--or is it her brother? And once he gets into too much trouble and Bullock saves him he ends up taking on this woman ... I don't know how to finish that sentence without seeming a total misogynist. I remember her being quite attractive.

And then there was Al Swearengen. Ultimately, I stopped watching Deadwood after Season One even though I think I owned Season Two--and my frustration was the show's fascination with Swearengen. During the first 20 minutes I haven't seen what his deal is yet, but what I remember is this: He's a total antihero, a conniving evil alpha gangster who runs the whole town.

But because he's charismatic and chews scenery and what-not, the show revolves around him and starts to make him more and more sympathetic ... It's like, it showed him doing something terrible in the first episode--possibly something involving this prostitute character named Trixie, who shot a customer because he was "beating on her."

He had conflicts with Bullock and maybe some kind of uneasy truce, but ultimately the show was very much about him, and maybe I felt unrealistically so. I don't know. I don't even know who I was ten years ago. Let's find out!