6 Reasons ‘Yellowstone’ Fans Should Check Out ‘Deadwood’ on Its 20th Anniversary
Fans of Yellowstone still have months to go before the Paramount Network hit returns with its last batch of episodes, but we have a TV anniversary to celebrate in the meantime. HBO’s 2004 series Deadwood, another small-screen Western, turns 20 on March 21.
Created by David Milch (NYPD Blue), Deadwood was set in the titular South Dakota town, with Timothy Olyphant playing the real-life sheriff Seth Bullock and Ian McShane playing the real-life saloon owner Al Swearengen. All 36 episodes of Deadwood are streaming on Max — as the 2019 follow-up, Deadwood: The Movie — and we reckon it’s high time for you to pay that town a visit, especially if you like Yellowstone. Here’s why.
1. Deadwood also tells a tale of greed and crime in the West, set around the time of Yellowstone spinoff 1883.
As Deadwood starts, it’s 1876, and the namesake community is a lawless mining camp overrun by misfits and criminals after the richest gold strike in U.S. history. Bullock moves in and sets up a hardware shop, and after the murder of Wild Bill Hickok (Keith Carradine), he becomes Deadwood’s sheriff, butting heads with Swearengen, who relies on violence and intimidation to keep business booming. Other colorful characters include doctor and grave robber Amos Cochran (Brad Dourif), peacocking mayor E. B. Barnum (William Sanderson), bushwhacker-turned-body guard Dan Dority (W. Earl Brown), and hallucinating minister Henry Smith (Ray McKinnon).
2. Its cast is even more star-studded than Yellowstone’s.
Along with Olyphant and McShane, the main Deadwood cast included Molly Parker (Lost in Space), Jim Beaver (Supernatural), John Hawkes (True Detective: Night Country), Paula Malcolmson (Ray Donovan), Titus Welliver (Bosch), Anna Gunn (Breaking Bad), and future Fear the Walking Dead stars Kim Dickens and Garret Dillahunt. And big names on the guest-star roster included Sarah Paulson, Brian Cox, Kristen Bell, and Nick Offerman.
3. Calamity Jane’s one-liners put Beth Dutton’s to shame.
Beth Dutton (Kelly Reilly) has a way with words when she’s putting someone down on Yellowstone. For example: “Every now and then, you say something that makes me think you’re smart. And then I look at you, and that thought fades.”
But Calamity Jane (Robin Weigert), Deadwood’s resident drunk frontierswoman, is even more cutting in her commentary. When she catches someone gawking at her, she says, “If I had that mug on me, I believe I’d cut down gettin’ told how butt f**kin’ ugly I was by not starin’ at f**kin’ strangers.”
4. The two shows share DNA behind the scenes.
Stunt performers Jason Rodriguez, Richard Bucher, Mark Norway, and Brian Duffy have both Yellowstone and Deadwood on their filmographies — as do special effects foreman Rick Figalan, set costumer Aimee McCue, second assistant director Alan Steinman, and director Ed Bianchi (who helmed eight Deadwood episodes and has directed two Yellowstone installments so far).
5. TV viewers say Deadwood is better than Yellowstone.
In a thread on the Deadwood subreddit and one on the Yellowstone subreddit, fans say Deadwood outdraws Yellowstone.
“I love Yellowstone, but it’s plot-driven and can feel very much like a soap,” one user wrote. “Deadwood is one [of] the most artistic things I’ve ever seen on TV. No comparison.”
Someone else said, “Deadwood tells dark, uncomfortable, realistic, materialist truths about power and violence and class. Yellowstone throws all of those things out the window and gives you a fantasy instead.”
And a third user wrote, “Deadwood is a Western and Yellowstone is a very casual, watered-down Western.”
6. And critics have hailed Deadwood hailed as one of the finest TV shows.
Television critics have fallen over themselves praising Deadwood over the years. The series is #15 on TV Insider’s 50 Best HBO Shows of All Time and #10 on our 13 Best TV Period Dramas. It also made IGN and Variety’s lists of the 100 best TV shows of all time, The Guardian said Deadwood was HBO’s best TV drama ever in 2015, and Vox called it the best-ever TV drama of any network the following year.
“Deadwood suggested that, at its best, society can even us all out, can make us realize there’s more to life than our own self-interest,” Vox’s Emily St. James wrote at the time. “Throughout it all, Milch’s dialogue … sang out as some of the best and most lyrical in TV history, spoken by some of its finest actors.”
