DEAD ON.(Deadwood)(Television program review)

It has been many years since Westerns were essentially black-and-white, cut-and-dried stories of good versus evil: morality tales with lots of horses and guns and one of everything else--a sheriff, an outlaw, an embattled hero, a town drunk, a whore with a heart of gold, a honky-tonk piano, and a schoolteacher from Illinois, who found out shortly after arriving in town that, for worse and for better, there was more to life than book learnin'. Indians were, for the most part, the obstacle that had to be overcome--although sometimes there was a "good one." Although Westerns have evolved, the conventions are still often glaring, making even Westerns that have gray, shadowy moral areas a tough sell to some people. There's just too much dust, leather, whinnying, shooting, and mud--too much brown--and not enough talking, understanding, humor, and complexity. The trappings of Westerns make them seem fake and message-y, even as they strain to be realistic. David Milch's "Deadwood," which begins its third season on HBO on Sunday, is the exception to the rule; in what I'd assumed was very poor soil, he's produced a gorgeously living thing.

"Deadwood" is set, of course, in Deadwood, in the Dakota Territory. It begins in 1876, when the settlement was just a few buildings in the crease between two hills, lining the sides of a muddy street, there to meet the needs of the men who flocked tothe Black Hills after gold was discovered in the area. The settlement is so small that your eye can take in the whole town at a glance; in a sense, viewers have the same perspective as Al Swearengen (Ian McShane), the saloonkeeper and power broker of the camp, who conducts much of his business from his second-story quarters, above the bar, but often goes out on his balcony to observe the goings on in town below. Over the first two seasons, we have watched Deadwood grow--the real Deadwood went from being a cluster of prospectors to a roiling community in less than a year. In the show, the cemetery expands; bigger, louder equipment is brought in to get at the gold deep underground; more prostitutes are shipped in. Seeing America being built in this way, we see what it is made of. Men are constantly digging, hauling, and hammering, and the desire, hard work, and risk that it took to create this place are always front and center. "Deadwood" takes you past the familiar cardboard cutouts of Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, and "the Old West," and acquaints you with the real forces and peoples that converged to form our country.

Milch, who co-created "NYPD Blue," with Steven Bochco, has a deep understanding of tortured souls and a gift for depicting the ways in which people are torn apart and come together. You never feel as though he were imposing a contemporary outlook onto the past in order to make his drama more "relatable"; instead, he shows how the past still lives in us. It's obvious that serious research went into "Deadwood," but, as Milch says, he ...