Deadwood

A week ago Sky Three popped up on my Freeview receiver for the first time, so I took a quick look at the schedules to see if there was anything there worth adding to my viewing habit. By and large, the answer was “no”: the expected mix of cheap “documentary” shows, repeats of years-old US shows, the sort of thing you’d expect from what I take to be Sky’s third-string channel (at best).

Then I looked a bit closer and spotted Deadwood running once a week and part-way through season 1. I’d heard of the show, and seen Ian McShane interviewed a couple of times since he started to garner acclaim for his role on the show, but I’d never had the chance to watch it. I missed the chance to catch last Saturday’s episode, the seventh of the first season, so tonight’s was my first chance to see what all the fuss was about.

Well, that’s one more hour of my week booked for the next however many months Sky Three chooses to run the show. Even without knowing anything about the background to the relations between the characters, I enjoyed tonight’s episode enormously. Ian McShane is by no means the only familiar face in the cast, or the only one doing a barnstorming job: you can’t go far wrong with the likes of Powers Boothe, Brad Dourif, William Sanderson, Jeffrey Jones and Molly Parker in a show created by David Milch.

Now the only question that remains is whether to track down the season 1 DVD so I can see what I missed in the first half of the first season.