After just two seasons, the HBO drama Deadwood has become one of cable's highest rated series, a symbol of how great television can be when pushed to its limits. From the masterful acting to the surprisingly credible re-creation of a Western gold-rush town to the provocative dialogue, Deadwood is television made at the highest level of craft. Now, through the eyes of series creator David Milch, the Emmy and Golden Globe Award-winning drama comes to life like never before. Imaginatively rendered and lavishly illustrated, Deadwood- Stories of the Black Hills is an unprecedented look at the people, places, and history of Deadwood, as seen and imagined by the show's creator, chief writer, and executive producer David Milch. Through in-depth discussions of the themes and motivations that run throughout Deadwood - from violence to gold to profane language - Milch sheds light on the characters and events of Deadwood. Fresh interviews with the Deadwood cast, never before seen photographs of the show, and dozens of historical photographs and objects vividly bring the most dangerous settlement in the West to life. Much more than a companion to the series, this book is an integral part of the show's storied mythology, as it examines, in great detail, the fascinating intersection of historical fact and inventive fiction - from Custer's opening of the Black Hills (and defeat by the Sioux), to the compelling story of the frontier Chinese, who endured years of racism in order to survive in the West. Entertaining and illuminating, Deadwood

Shakespeare is everywhere in contemporary media culture. This book explores the reasons for this dissemination and reassemblage. Ranging widely over American TV drama, it discusses the use of citations in Westworld and The Wire, demonstrating how they tap into but also transform Shakespeare’s preferred themes and concerns. It then examines the presentation of female presidents in shows such as Commander in Chief and House of Cards, revealing how they are modelled on figures of female sovereignty from his plays. Finally, it analyses the specifically Shakespearean dramaturgy of Deadwood and The Americans. Ultimately, the book brings into focus the way serial TV drama appropriates Shakespeare in order to give voice to the unfinished business of the American cultural imaginary.

Is The Wire better than Breaking Bad? Is Cheers better than Seinfeld? What's the best high school show ever made? Why did Moonlighting really fall apart? Was the Arrested Development Netflix season brilliant or terrible? For twenty years-since they shared a TV column at Tony Soprano's hometown newspaper-critics Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz have been debating these questions and many more, but it all ultimately boils down to this: What's the greatest TV show ever? That debate reaches an epic conclusion in TV (THE BOOK). Sepinwall and Seitz have identified and ranked the 100 greatest scripted shows in American TV history. Using a complex, obsessively all-encompassing scoring system, they've created a Pantheon of top TV shows, each accompanied by essays delving into what made these shows great. From vintage classics like The Twilight Zone and I Love Lucy to modern masterpieces like Mad Men and Friday Night Lights, from huge hits like All in the Family and ER to short-lived favorites like Firefly and Freaks and Geeks, TV (THE BOOK) will bring the triumphs of the small screen together in one amazing compendium. Sepinwall and Seitz's argument has ended. Now it's time for yours to begin!

The true life histories of Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, and other residents of the lawless town known as Deadwood—the inspiration for the award-winning HBO® series and film. With a cast of historically rich characters, The Real Deadwood explores the lives of Wild Bill Hickok, Al Swearengen, Seth Bullock, Calamity Jane, Sol Star, and a host of others who walked the streets of Deadwood. An historical crossroad of the American west, even Wyatt Earp came to Deadwood, only to bump heads with Sheriff Seth Bullock. Other celebrated visitors over the years include Buffalo Bill Cody, the Sundance Kid, Bat Masterson, and Teddy Roosevelt. Looking at the world of primitive medicine, prostitution, and law from lawlessness, The Real Deadwood separates the facts from the fiction in its overview of a town violent enough to rival the likes of Tombstone, Dodge City, and Abilene. This is the true story of life on the frontier—when roughing it was truly rough. It's good versus evil and civilization versus anarchy. It's the real Deadwood.

Considers the HBO series Deadwood in the context of the television Western genre and the intersection of capital and violence in American history. By dramatizing the intersection of self-interested capitalism and foundational violence in a mining camp in 1870s South Dakota, the HBO series Deadwood reinvented the television Western. In this volume, Ina Rae Hark examines the groundbreaking series from a variety of angles: its relationship to past iterations of the genre on the small screen; its production context, both within the HBO paradigm and as part of the oeuvre of its creator and showrunner David Milch; and its thematics. Hark’s comprehensive analysis also takes into account the series’ trademark use of language: both its unrelenting and ferocious obscenity and the brilliant complexity of its dialogue. Hark argues that Deadwood dissolves several traditional binaries of the Western genre. She demonstrates that while the show appears to pit individuality, savagery, lawlessness, social regulation, and civilization against each other, its narrative shows that apparent opposites are often analogues, and these forces can morph into allies very quickly. Indeed, perhaps the show’s biggest paradox and most profound revelation is that self-interest and communitarianism cannot survive without each other. Hark closely analyzes Al Swearengen (as played by Ian McShane), the character who most embodies this paradox. A brutal cutthroat and purveyor of any vice that can turn him a profit, Swearengen nevertheless becomes the figure who forges connections among the camp’s disparate individuals and shepherds their growth into a community. Deadwood is quintessentially, if unflatteringly, American in what it reveals about the dark underpinnings of national success rooted not in some renewed Eden but in a town that is, in the apt words of one of its promotional taglines, "a hell of a place to make your fortune." Fans of the show and scholars of television history will enjoy Hark’s analysis of Deadwood.

DEADWOOD, DAKOTA TERRITORIES, 1876: Legendary gunman Wild Bill Hickcock and his friend Charlie Utter have come to the Black Hills town of Deadwood fresh from Cheyenne, fleeing an ungrateful populace. Bill, aging and sick but still able to best any man in a fair gunfight, just wants to be left alone to drink and play cards. But in this town of played-out miners, bounty hunters, upstairs girls, Chinese immigrants, and various other entrepeneurs and miscreants, he finds himself pursued by a vicious sheriff, a perverse whore man bent on revenge, and a besotted Calamity Jane. Fueled by liquor, sex, and violence, this is the real wild west, unlike anything portrayed in the dime novels that first told its story.

Pioneer Days in the Black Hills is a rough-and-tumble account of the early days of Deadwood, Dakota Territory. In 1874, after leading an expedition into the Black Hills, George Armstrong Custer announced that he had found gold "among the roots of the grass." Almost overnight a number of settlements sprang into existence. Among them was Deadwood. In April 1876, John S. McClintock arrived in search of gold. Entering a series of speculations and employments that won him moderate prosperity, he made Deadwood his home. During his later years, he wrote his memoirs, presented here for the first time in half a century.