- (Rolling Stone) “The Best Drama on Television” is back with the third season on DVD! Timed to coincide with Father’s Day, HBO will release Deadwood: The Complete Third Season DVD on June 12, 2007. Watch as the lawless era of Deadwood comes to an end. This DVD is loaded with bonus features including two featurettes, audio commentaries and more.Running Time: 720 min. Format: DVD MOVIE Genre:&nb
(Rolling Stone) “The Best Drama on Television” is back with the third season on DVD! Timed to coincide with Father’s Day, HBO will release Deadwood: The Complete Third Season DVD on June 12, 2007. Watch as the lawless era of Deadwood comes to an end. This DVD is loaded with bonus features including two featurettes, audio commentaries and more.
DVD Features:
Audio Commentary
Featurette
The final complete season of HBO’s remarkable Deadwood series is full of surprises and devastating experiences as the nascent, dangerous town prepares to join Dakota territory in 1877. As in the previous two seasons, the question of who will control the town’s resources, assets, and people drives much of the drama, affecting all manner of relationships and alliances, often between the most unlikely people. The dominant storyline in Deadwood: The Complete Third Season concerns upcoming elections for mayor and sheriff of the mucky, gold-mining town. The real juice, however, is not so much between the individuals running for office as between two power brokers each trying to steer the results toward their own purposes. Saloon owner and Deadwood’s puppetmaster, Al Swearengen (Ian McShane sustaining his brilliant peformance in the previous two seasons), works closely with incumbent lawman Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant) on retaining the latter’s seat. But Bullock himself has difficulty surrendering his penchant for taking unambiguous action and relying on few words, especially when he has to act like a politician and deal with people such as George Hearst (Gerald McRaney, playing the real-life father of William Randolph Hearst). Swearengen’s rival, Hearst–a self-made industrialist who gained his fortune through mining–has every intention of overtaking Deadwood, with his eye particularly on the lucrative mine owned by Bullock’s former lover, Alma (Molly Parker). (The violence Hearst employs to get to Alma’s claim will stun many Deadwood fans.)
Meanwhile, Bullock’s old friend, Sol Starr (John Hawkes), runs for mayor against the feckless E.B. Farnum (William Sanderson), and tries to navigate through his difficult relationship with Trixie (Paula Malcomson) as she grows enraged by former lover Swearengen’s manipulation of her and everyone else. Calamity Jane (Robin Weigert) is encouraged to become a public speaker, telling of her misadventures with General George Custer, and she commences a lesbian relationship with Joanie (Kim Dickens), the saloon owner who is becoming increasingly despondent and suicidal. Bullock’s relationship with his wife, Martha (Anna Gunn) continues to deepen and become more of an influence on him, Wyatt Earp comes for a visit, and a newcomer to town, Jack Langrishe (Brian Cox), an old friend of Swearengen, attempts to open a theatre. As expected, the season finale concludes with the long-awaited election, but HBO’s decision to bring Deadwood to an end required creator David Milch to wrap everything up in a pair of two-hour movies. Still, The Complete Third Season is very satisfying on every level, and will always be, along with the rest of the series, a television landmark. –Tom Keogh
Stills from Deadwood (Click for larger image)
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Buy “Deadwood – The Complete Third Season” For Only $34.94
April 2, 2008
#1
Pure filth!!! I bought the first three seasons on someone elses recommendation. Wish I had saved my money. I give it minus 50 stars.
April 2, 2008
#2
If you watch the series- you will understand the title-
Very entertaining and a lot of cussing and a lot of cussing and a lot of cussing and a lot of cussing and a lot of cussing and a lot of cussing and a lot of cussing and a lot of cussing and a lot of cussing and a lot of cussing.
April 3, 2008
#3
Interesting premise: fact based stories, realistic production design and a good cast all set in a real town from the old west but all undermined by some silly competition to see which of the low-lifes can use the F-word the most. One well played scene after another gets the dramatic momentum ripped out from under it by this over-the-top dialogue. Perhaps they thought that if it worked for the Sopranos it would work here.
April 3, 2008
#4
With the first season of Deadwood, a big initial turn off for me was the level of profanity. The character of Calamity Jane in particular made me want to just turn off the television. My wife and I stuck it out, and when I saw the writer justify this by saying that it brought authenticity to the dialog, I found myself able to accept this. If you wanted to survive in Deadwood, you had to come across as one mean hombre.
The problem though is that the writer is a little disingenuous in claiming that he is attempting to be true to the way characters might have conversed in those times. I say this because clearly in the 3rd season, his characters all have such an affinity for William Shakespeare that they’ve taken to talking like the bard! Every snippet of dialog is completely pretentious in this regard, and everything the characters have to say is incomprehensible.
Not understanding the characters would have been bad enough, but the over embellished language was used to explain motivations and actions. Because I could not decode what the characters were going on about, I was baffled by the way they behaved. Consider the following:
1)Hearst is a character that no one in town likes. It is safe to say that without a doubt they hate him. In seasons past this would have been enough for this character to have spent some quality time with Wu’s pigs. Somehow though, he never comes to any harm!
2)There is a troupe of actors that comes to the town. What is their purpose? Who knows? Their relevance to anything is inscrutable.
3)What is the deal with Tolliver and his henchmen? With Hearst and his henchmen? With Tolliver and Hearst?
4)What is the deal with Steve and his deal to buy the stables? Why do any of the characters think it is a good/reasonable idea? How exactly has Steve managed to avoid Wu’s pigs through SO many episodes?
5)What is the significance of the election? Why should the audience even care?
6)Why can’t Trixie be happy with Saul already. Yeah, we get that she’s been a prostitute since as far back as anyone can remember, but does that mean she has to be abrasive and obnoxious to everyone for the rest of her life?
7)I can’t help but like Charlie Udder. His character development though seems incredibly neglected, and none of the other characters (even Joanie in this season) seem to even notice his existence. Why?
8)Al’s man and Hearst’s man get in a fight to the death. Yeah, this was interesting in a visceral WWF kind of way, but what was the point of it really? Why did Al not just shoot the man dead himself for having cut off his finger? Why did Al not shoot his master while he was at it for good measure?
9)Why was sneaking around so ‘Hearst doesn’t see’ so important at various points in the season? Why was Hearst simply not dealt with?
All these curious items and many, many more could perhaps be easily deduced had the dialog not been so contrived and pretentious. As it was, I ultimately became disgusted enough with the writing as to not even care about the outcome.
This series needed to die, if only to save people from the narcissistic impulses of its writer.
April 3, 2008
#5
This is a good Western story, But has a lot of Swearing and some Nudity. I would not buy these DVD’s if you get offended by hearing the F word every Five minutes.