I don't know what you mean.
This show is one of the best things I've watched on TV in a long time.
Excerpt from a TNR review I liked:
<snip>
As Dourif's Doc Cochran puts it: "I see as much misery out of them movin' to justify themselves as them that set out to do harm." In other words, "Deadwood" is going to tell human experience like it is: every person a mingled yarn, good and ill, not a black- or white-hatted caricature of pure evil versus pure good. Of course, the phrase "mingled yarn, good and ill" is Shakespeare's: Television's new style of complexity has been around for a long time. To read a lot of the current commentary on "Deadwood," one would think the idea that a person can be good and bad at the same time is a secret that popular culture has only recently pried from the clutches of high art. In fact, such "complexity" has been part and parcel of the Western for a long time, but it was an integral mingling of opposite moral qualities, not a self-consciously constructed "complexity." Consider the subtle undermining of a living legend--Jimmy Stewart's Senator Ransom--in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance; or the deconstruction of gender roles in Johnny Guitar; or the dissolution of ethical categories in One-Eyed Jacks. Even Howard Hawks's Red River possesses depths of nuance and ambiguity, though it has the reputation of being so much the archetypal old-fashioned Western that McMurtry made it the last picture--the last cinematic example of bygone heroic grandeur--in his The Last Picture Show. But the struggle between John Wayne, the brutal father, and Montgomery Clift, the soft, vulnerable, almost feminine son, implies all the murky libidinal and egoistic conflict a jaded palate could hope for. And it's set against the background of the cattle drive, which enveloped the "old" cowboy movies with the very theme of appetite and instinct running up against civilized boundaries that you get in "Deadwood." Back then, however, viewers had to apply their imaginations to the themes like miners prospecting gold with pick-axes and pans.
So though "Deadwood" is all about digging deep for treasure, it's own depths are right there, strewn with blood and guts and Mametian "fucks" all over the surface of the screen. Yet it's hard to understand why so many people seem startled by the grit--especially when Homicide and Glengarry Glen Ross are right there on your cable menu, nestled up against "Deadwood." After all, aggressive seaminess is one of HBO's trademarks: think "Oz," think "Sopranos." Or recall the 1999 HBO cowboy movie The Jack Bull with John Cusack, which was based on a story by the nineteenth-century German novelist Heinrich von Kleist about the perverted consequences of a fanatical quest for justice, an adaptation that proved how easily the Western genre accommodates muddy, mingled yarns, even from the hands of a German romantic who probably never laid eyes on a pair of chaps or a Colt Peacemaker.
Take away the show's moderate (by this point in time) sex and violence, and its immoderate cussing, and "Deadwood" is really a very enjoyable, good old-fashioned cowboy movie whose characters are, in the end, no more discomfiting than the characters in more conventional-seeming cowboy movies. If anything, the show's violence rules its plots with an iron hand; your senses get addicted to the extremity and you find yourself in something like a state of withdrawal as you patiently absorb the subtle, sensitive character studies. Like most serious television drama, the series is driven by characters rather than plot, and you occasionally get the former stopping to recap storylines that get tangled and obscure as they hurtle along in their violent direction, while the writers follow a different direction and concentrate on developing their fictional people. But though these figures often unfold with great psychological nuance, their yarns don't stay mingled for long.
<snip>
Swearengen (superbly played by Ian McShane) doesn't commit a single infraction without a practical purpose that is rooted in his rational apprehension of his environment. Unlike the motive-less Iagos or the solipsistic Raskolnikovs of literature, knowable, understandable, self-explanatory villains like Swearengen are popular culture's gratifying gift to the sleepless. They are not malign; they are quantitative; they proceed, as we like to say, "pragmatically." We can grasp their nefarious purposes over lunch. And just in case the illusion of knowable evil isn't sufficient to calm viewers excited by all the violence and bad words, McShane and the other actors play their characters theatrically, rather than, as on "Sex and the City," naturalistically, or, as on "The Sopranos," a combination of the two styles. So, in the end, the "shattering" grittiness of "Deadwood" serves to create the illusion that the most extreme violence is distinguished by outsized dialogue and a controllable cause. "Deadwood"'s real pleasure comes between extremities: the drama of how people live when they're not being shot at, beaten, or stabbed, but simply under pressure of the nakedly human.
https://ssl.tnr.com/p/docsub.mhtml?i=tube&s=siegel032904subcription req'd
Lee Siegel is TNR's television critic.
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