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Sunday 24 March 2019

Day 330: Reconnoitre

Eesh. Went for a half-hour nap after work, fell asleep until now. Feel broken and weird. But I have just found out the HBO movie of Deadwood is coming out this May, fully 13 years after the last season was abruptly cancelled, and I am giddy as a schoolchild.

Deadwood was the best ever American television show not set in Baltimore. It was nuanced, contemplative, profound, funny as all hell, and slick with some of the most playful dialogue this side of Shakespeare. It had stand-out performances from superb character actors - Brad Dourif, William Sanderson, John Hawkes, Powers Boothe - as well as a great central dynamic between Timothy Olyphant's rigid yet hotheaded Sheriff Bullock and Ian McShane's conniving, monstrous, and monstrously entertaining saloon owner Al Swearengen.

If memory serves it had perhaps lost some of its bite through the third season, and I'm glad it never had an opportunity to slide gradually into mediocrity as so many shows have before it - but equally the build-up of the plot was left entirely unresolved, and the fact that HBO have taken some of those bags of gold they've earned from the increasingly formulaic Game of Thrones and furnished it on the dusty old backwater prospecting town of Deadwood makes me exceedingly happy.

Come the end of May I'll be pouring myself some of that fucking black Darjeeling and going for a reconnoitre of the rim. If you've not seen the show you've probably got enough time between now and then to catch up. Nothing else happening on television before then, as far as I know.

Daenerys who?

Ta ra x

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