I’ve always been fond of westerns. I watched Gunsmoke, Have Gun Will Travel, Maverick, and the Rifleman, to name a few, growing up as a kid. While I enjoyed watching these shows, I realize now they weren’t very realistic about how people lived in the late 1800’s. In most of these shows they speak modern English, their clothes are clean and perfect, and when the hero shoots he rarely misses, while the bad guy shooting back always misses. I get it. They’re a series, and you can’t kill off the hero.
There is, however, a more recently made western I continue to watch over and over.That show is Deadwood, which ran for 3 seasons on HBO. The show is not intended to be a documentary, but thanks to its creator, the talented David Milch, the story, action, and dialogue, however contrived, is very realistic, at least to me. People swear, spit, and generally behave badly in almost every episode, which makes sense for a gold mining camp with no law on Indian territory.
I’m looking for any other westerns that are similar to Deadwood in their gritty realism. If you can recommend any, I would be interested in hearing about them, and in particular how they compare to Deadwood.
Few shows really compare against Deadwood, but a couple I have recently enjoyed:
The English was really good, about a woman from England who has returned to America to look for her husband and ends up in all sorts of predicaments. Godless was similarly toned, it was about a town largely run by women left behind after a mining accident, terrorised by a dickhead.
Going back a number of years but what about Lonesome Dove. Not as gritty as Deadwood but it was a couple of notches higher than your usual broadcast TV western.
If you read a few articles about the series when it came out, almost 20 years go, you’ll find that much of the vulgar dialogue that Milch included in the series wasn’t true to the actual times in Deadwood. Milch amped up the vulgarity of the swearing to make it offensive to today’s ears, because the cursing that was actuall used in the 1870’s and would have been extremely offensive then, would be considered mild today.
Paramount+ has a number of recent western series added to their line-up.
Yes, and this is absolutely true. While use of modern profanity strays from realism, it makes the dialogue more powerful to today’s ears. I would rather they had not done that, but I understand why they did it, and in a way, it ,makes the show easier to watch.
I think their actual words were that if Al Swearingen was cutting loose with authentic period profanities he’d sound like Yosemite Sam, which would tend to slightly undercut the dramatic effect they sought. In retrospect this was a good call.
I would recommend “The Warrior”, a very gritty show set in late 1800’s San Fransisco during the ‘Tong wars’. Based on a story concept from Bruce Lee (which was stolen from him and made into “Kung Fu”). This is Lee’s original concept, and it’s much better than Kung Fu. Dark, violent, sometimes funny, with fantastic fight scenes all through it.
