Deadwood

 

I recently decided to re-watch these amazing that I’d first seen around ten years ago, and since I had never seen the movie that concludes it, I decided to watch it from front to back. It is one of the best westerns I have ever seen, especially in the 21^st century, when the genre and this type of storytelling has suffered so many changes.

And as I remembered Deadwood was just amazing to watch. The story follows the town of Deadwood and its inhabitants, although the focus first is on newly arrived former sheriff Seth Bullock, it soon shifts to encompass several characters all played to perfection by an amazing cast. Each inhabitant of this frontier town has a role in the narrative, no matter how small it may be, and the perceptions of each one changes as the series continues, for these are grey characters, not black and white. A villain in an episode can become a hero over the time that spans each season, and the best example of this instance is Al Swearagen played perfectly by Ian McShane.

The dynamics in the town change over each season and, in the movie we have the best conclusion one can have to a series about the hardships, betrayals and alliances that are formed in the day-to-day life of a small town. A frontier mining town that is going through the brutal, political and, yes, bureaucratic process of being annexed to the United States, since it was basically part of Indian territory in the beginning of the series.

It is a series that deserves being revisited, especially since the process of concluding it with a movie many years after it was cancelled on the third season with a cliff-hanger, was a long one and most of the cast returned to it, showing that an ending to a story can come late, but be worth the wait.