Black Hills Blue: Classical Allusion in HBO’s Deadwood (2004-06)

Monica S. Cyrino (University of New Mexico)

When Deadwood premiered on HBO in March of 2004, viewers were confronted with yet another exceptional series in which the premium cable network would again challenge existing literary/cinematic genres and character stereotypes, by dismantling and ultimately recreating them into an utterly new form. The series takes on the venerable American genre of the Western, and sets it in late-1870s Deadwood, little more than a “camp” in the untamed Dakota Territory, populated by random types seeking their fortunes prospecting for gold in the Black Hills. Over three seasons, the series chronicles the rough progress of Deadwood from camp to town, as it explores numerous weighty, complicated, hot-button themes such as politics, capitalism, immigration, sexuality, violence and race, all within the framework of the formation of society. Like other HBO shows, Deadwood mixes historical characters (Seth Bullock, Wild Bill Hickock, Calamity Jane, Wyatt Earp, George Hearst) with fictional ones, mingling them in well-devised plots both based on the historical record and enlivened by the creative imaginations of the writers. The series was widely praised by critics for its casting, art direction, and the near-Shakespearean complexity and beauty of its dialogue.

Series creator David Milch (NYPD Blue) has frequently stated in interviews that he wanted to produce a series that would investigate “the way civilization comes together out of chaos.” Initially, he wanted to set his series in ancient Rome, as the foundational story of Western culture, but HBO had already begun production on their acclaimed series, Rome (2005-07). So Milch decided to look closer to home, and chose to explore the American foundational myth as it is represented in the cinematic Western. While Deadwood focuses on its main theme of bringing order out of disorder, what we might recognize as the quintessential classical motif, the series reveals its mythographic roots by often referring to the ancient Greco-Roman world. The famously foul-mouthed denizens of Deadwood constantly pepper their speech with allusions to classical history, literature and mythology. This paper will offer a survey of these allusions, setting them within the larger narrative project of the series, that is, to examine the way the wild frontier of America made itself into a community in the image of Greco-Roman antiquity.