Deadwords

People often spoke of the "Shakespearean" language in the HBO series, Deadwood, but I had ignored the series until recently.  No more Sopranos, welcome to Deadwood.  The first season finale is one of the best hours that such television has to offer.  The Sopranos were a metaphor for what we are today; Deadwood may be a metaphor of how we grew up to become Americans. 

Apart from the excellence of the acting and the wild west ambiance, it is indeed the language that makes this a superior program.  Whether historically correct or imaginatively invented, it delights one's sensibilities.  I would hope the subtitles do it justice.  I particularly like this because one of my pet peeves is period language that hasn't a clue.  So many movies about the 1960s through 1980s use language or gestures that had not yet fallen into the vernacular.  The black sports "based on a true story" movie, Pride, succumbs to this several times.  The young swimmers say and do things that didn't really happen until some twenty years later.  Bobby, about Kennedy's assassination, also lost me several times when people said and did things that rang false.  The costumes may have been researched, but the way people talk wasn't very well.  Happens all the time.

One of the best things about Zodiac, about the California serial killer, is the fact that it was painstakingly tweaked for authenticity, in look and word.  It's coming out on DVD soon.  Like Deadwood, I'll want to re-watch it, not for the story so much as for the careful re-creation of a time and place.