It’s hard to even know where to start with Deadwood. This could easily be a 1,000-word blog post on any number of things about the show: its fascinating adaptation of a specific time and place in American history, its immense network of characters and plotlines, its distinctive and completely idiosyncratic dialogue, the detailed attention to set design and costume… it overwhelms. Ian McShane’s performance alone deserves 1,000 words.

And in truth, that’s the takeaway experience of Deadwood, a sense of an immense amount of stuff crammed into a relatively small container. The show is set in an American frontier town in what will eventually become Kansas, right at the beginning of Deadwood’s gold boom. Every shot of someone walking down the street overflows with people, mud, horses, signs for new businesses, price lists for food and hardware, laundry drying on a line, broken liquor bottles, piles of newspapers, dogs, sacks full of mail, wagons, stands selling food, two guys in a bar fight that’s expanded outside, women emptying chamber pots from balconies, prostitutes leaning up against porch railings soliciting tricks. Even in the camp’s many indoor spaces, rooms are crammed full of things hanging from the ceilings, things littering the floors, lanterns and glasses and pistols piled up on every flat surface. It’s an aesthetic mirrored in the show’s narrative structure, where a single episode can follow twenty-three characters and five plotlines, and even mirrored in the dialogue, which comes spilling out in arcane obscenities and multiple subordinate clauses.

Swearengen and Mr. Wu discuss business in Mr. Wu's very full meat locker

The dominant impression is perpetual movement. Deals constantly develop which shift balances of power and new characters arrive to con and be conned. The camp itself is always being pushed into a new status, reaching for new technologies and struggling to come part of American statehood. Al Swearengen, played by Ian McShane, may be the closest the show comes to a main character, the owner of the Gem Saloon who has a finger in every pie and oversees nearly every piece of business that enters the camp. And yet even Al can’t keep up with everything: there’s an amazing line at the end of the first season when Al stands looking out of his balcony into the window of Mrs. Alma Garrett, whose hotel room looks straight into his office across the street. The first season begins with Swearengen trying to swindle Mrs. Garrett’s husband by convincing him to purchase a gold claim thought to be worthless. When Mr. Garrett decides he’s bought a bad claim, and Swearengen’s henchman Dan Doherty simultaneously realizes the claim is actually immensely profitable, Swearengen orders Dan to kill Mr. Garrett. Swearengen causes the death of Mrs. Garrett’s husband, the camp sheriff is now in love with her, she’s taking care of a child Swearengen considered murdering to protect the camp from bad rumors, and yet, Swearengen looks at her across the street and says, “Do you know, I’ve never spoken to her once since she come to camp?”

Alma Garrett, seen from Al Swearengen's balcony

It’s astonishing. How is it possible that two characters with such entangled plotlines have never even met each other? A similar moment happens later in season two, when Jane Cannery (better known as Calamity Jane) stumbles into a whorehouse and meets Joanie Stubbs, who has had a great deal of contact with Jane’s best friend in the camp, Charlie Utter. They formally introduce themselves to each other, and it seems remarkable that these women have never met before. It’s an indicator of just how crowded Deadwood really is – the show follows so many different characters and plots that these relatively significant characters haven’t even met, even though they all live practically next door to one another. At one point, as several people all vie for a table at a local restaurant, Mr. Merick actually start to talk about how absurdly full the place is. “It is terribly crowded today. We were just remarking just yesterday that it couldn’t possible get more crowded. And yet today, it is!” Charlie Utter, waiting in a line to get a seat, puts it more directly: “Is it fucking crowded in here, or do you just got some big fucking feet?” he asks the man in front of him. “Maybe it’s a lethal combination of them both.”

There are a lot of crowded shows around these days – it’s become an important mark of complexity, or difficulty, or quality, or something. There probably aren’t that many more characters on Deadwood than The West Wing, The Sopranos, or Lost, and certainly not any more than The Wire. But there are a few things that differentiate Deadwood’s crush of people. For one, many of those shows build their multiple plotlines around something like a thematic unity, or at least make space for self-reflection. The West Wing often does this well: a Thanksgiving episode will unpack that holiday’s significance in American mythology through several interlocking plotlines that allow characters to muse about family, pilgrimage, heritage, history, and turkeys. For many of its earlier seasons, The Sopranos used Jennifer Melfi as a space to allow Tony to reflect on his life and livelihood, which gave viewers the same opportunity to engage in thinking about the show above the level of plot. When there’s a thematic unity or an internal system of self-consideration, the crowds seem much less crowded. Character systems and individual strands of the plot sort themselves into networks and hierarchies, and the inner organizing system is felt, if not seen.

William Bullock and Tom Nuttall examining Mr. Nuttall's new bicycle

Deadwood rarely uses those kinds of self-sorting techniques, and so the jumble of people remains a jumble, often frustrating, but also frequently astonishing. The other characteristic that distinguishes Deadwood’s mob from the hordes in other shows is the total emptiness that surrounds it. The Wire is set in Baltimore, and while the show seems to touch on characters from nearly every segment of the city, the city itself isn’t an isolated space. Characters in The Wire may feel trapped in Baltimore, but the show acknowledges the existence of New York, Annapolis, Washington DC, Philadelphia, all within an easy day’s drive. There is nothing within a day’s drive to Deadwood. People crush together, filling every corner and driving up the price of real estate, but the camp is surrounded by complete wilderness. The crowd is there because it chooses to be, because it’s a camp full of potential on the very edge of political legitimacy. Deadwood is full of people building new streets and hanging signs from every new building, because the throng is self-defining, and because the act of hanging a sign means that there’s something there to be named. On most shows, the mass of characters is a means to an end, allowing the show to incorporate more content and further expand its fictional world. On Deadwood, the crowd is the point.

Timothy Olyphant as Raylan Givens

This makes the connections between the two shows all the more fascinating, particularly because Justified also recalls Deadwood’s careful attention to a specific breed of Americana. After a serious misstep on the job in Miami, Givens gets reassigned back to his home town in Kentucky, where the villages he needs to visit aren’t even entered into the GPS, and a nasty gang of neo-Nazis has taken over the county. In this respect, too, Justified echoes some of the central themes of Deadwood – this place is un-mapped, out of sync with the rest of the country, and dominated by a few powerful individuals. While not as intensely idiosyncratic as Deadwood, Harlan County also has its characteristic language and patterns of dialogue (although this may have more to do with Leonard’s influence than specific Kentuckyisms).

Timothy Olyphant as Seth Bullock

It’s not hard to make these comparisons and they’re certainly not the most insightful form of criticism, but Justified comes into its own more clearly when seen in contrast to a show like Deadwood. Seth Bullock is an integral part of Deadwood, one part of an enormous cast, where he’s definitely not the most charismatic figure of the bunch, or even the most influential. Sheriff Bullock was an expected and respected part of his community, but Raylan is an antique. Somehow, he’s strolled right out of a nineteenth-century Western and into a story where the cops can’t shoot people on the spot and criminals use rocket launchers to blow up churches. (To be fair, they also rob banks, which is a pretty classic Western trope). The pilot episode mediates this somewhat by introducing Givens in a high-end Florida hotel, where he fits in as well as a down-and-out NYC cop who’s been unexpectedly transported into a sci-fi flick. He’s so out of place there, that by the time he shows up in Kentucky and his boss shrugs off some of Given’s eccentricities, they seem a bit more reasonable. Still, the impact on the show’s structure is quite clear: while Deadwood was about an entire American frontier town, Justified is built on one man who was clearly born in the wrong century. A pretty badass man, by the way, and I did mention he wears a giant hat, right?

Always gotta keep an eye out for the neo-Nazi redneck gangs

I enjoyed the pilot a great deal, and for a show that is going to live and die with its protagonist, I think Timothy Olyphant carries the role incredibly well. I haven’t read any of the Elmore Leonard books with Raylan Givens in them, but I do wonder a little how his character will evolve. So often on television, protagonists shift less through what they do in the primary timeline of the show, but more through our perception of them as we learn about their pasts. I’m thinking primarily here of what we slowly learn about Don Draper on Mad Men, but also revelations about Tony Soprano’s childhood, Omar Little and his relationship with Butchie on The Wire – heck, Lost built several seasons on that exact narrative technique. Raylan needs some of that backstory, and Justified looks primed to give it to us, with the pilot dancing around repeated references to Raylan’s father. But I’m seriously curious about what that backstory might be. How does a man end up in the twenty-first century as a nineteenth-century lawman? At the moment, the character seems so much like he’s just stepped out of a stagecoach and into a town car, it’s hard to imagine what that development could look like. I’m looking forward to finding out.