Note to The Vestibule’s subscribers (11 February 2025): Late last year, while enjoying my annual holiday respite from university teaching, I received, in December 2024’s final week, a message from a correspondent I hadn’t previously known requesting copies of an article, first published on 1 September 2010, that addressed the then-hot topic of American television’s “New Golden Age,” as so many people—critics, reviewers, scholars, and everyday folk—were discussing, in person and online, during those halcyon days.

Yes, 14 years had passed since I’d prepared this essay for the publishing behemoth ABC-CLIO’s online Enduring Questions Database, a project into which I’d been enlisted by two Greenwood Publishing Group editors named George Butler and Rebecca Matheson, who asked me to choose one question from a long list of 50-plus queries they’d compiled, then prepare a punchy article about this topic.

George and Rebecca had conceived the Enduring Questions project as a forum where intelligent readers—meaning people not necessarily grounded in the critical theories then (and now) dotting the academic landscape, but who were quick studies nonetheless—could encounter learned essays about relevant cultural questions that omitted the ornate jargon, dense sentences, and impenetrable prose that, they felt, characterized too much academic writing, especially scholarship in the humanities.

In other words, Rebecca remarked while probing my interest in contributing to the Enduring Questions project, let’s be rigorous, yet accessible in our work. This pithy declaration suggested that any Enduring Questions author should write scholarship that people might actually enjoy reading (gasp!) rather than adopting the elitist tone that characterized just enough specialist fare—again, particularly in the humanities—to make its audience members grind their collective teeth in frustration, if not anger.

This invitation proved irresistible to me, a person who’d railed against bad scholarly writing even before I began, in August 1998, graduate study in Washington University in St. Louis’s Department of English & American Literature (now the Department of English). I was, in Summer 2010, a newly promoted—yet still untenured—associate professor in the University of Guam’s Division of English & Applied Linguistics whose resistance to the leaden, even somnambulistic prose encountered in professional journals had only stiffened in the years since I’d received my doctorate. I’m sorry to say that my dissertation, about Philip K. Dick’s visionary fiction, was full of such writing, so I now take the opportunity to apologize to every member of my dissertation committee for inflicting such dross upon them.

Even so, I’d begun living the life of a gainfully employed scholar interested in literature, in culture, in literary culture, and in popular culture—something I hadn’t dreamed possible while in graduate school. Yet here I was, teaching undergraduate and graduate students while publishing journal articles and, in 2007 (in hardback) and again in 2009 (in paperback), Future Imperfect: Philip K. Dick at the Movies, the first of four scholarly monographs I’d author, with the second (The Postmodern Humanism of Philip K. Dick) appearing in early 2009 and the third (“The Wire,” “Deadwood,” “Homicide,” and “NYPD Blue”: Violence Is Power) appearing in Summer 2010.

I don’t recall reading much past the question “Was There Ever a Golden Age of Television?” before saying “Yes!” to George’s and Rebecca’s request. Then began a happy period of reading, watching, and thinking about American television’s development as an artistic and commercial medium, even if some people didn’t acknowledge the art part.

After receiving suggestions from three peer reviewers and then revising my draft to George’s and Rebecca’s satisfaction, this piece was published in the Enduring Questions Database on 1 September 2010. Yet that database no longer exists, at least in the same form that it did 15 years ago. Although I thought I’d received offprints of “Out of the Twilight Zone: American Television Comes of Age” (my article’s eventual title) from Rebecca (and, moreover, thought I’d taken screenshots of this essay’s digital version), I couldn’t find them anywhere last December.

And I still can’t find them, although I’ve looked here and there, in the real and online worlds. I’ll continue sleuthing around my campus office, my home office, and ABC-CLIO’s website for the published piece, but I recently realized that my final-draft manuscript may be all that’s left.

As such, I now present to you “Out of the Twilight Zone: American Television Comes of Age,” the first of my three contributions to the Enduring Questions Database. I’ve aligned it with The Vestibule’s house style while revising certain passages for clarity, yet resisted the temptation to include television programs broadcast since this piece’s original (2010) publication. As such, reading it evokes the sensation of traveling backward in time one-and-a-half decades, so I hope taking this journey is as fun for you as it has been for me.

Please note that the Enduring Questions format (replicated here) includes six units: 1) the Question, 2) a Quick Response, 3) the Essay, 4) the Works Cited section, 5) the Further Reading section, and 6) the Endnotes section.

You’ll also find in the Files section digital versions of some, but not all, articles and books mentioned below.

All the best—Jason

Addendum to Introductory Note (17 February 2025): While methodically searching my campus office for a copy of this essay, I found one in a folder lodged on the floor of my filing cabinet’s bottom drawer, buried under the many other folders hanging there, as if someone (who could it be?) shoved the original folder there rather than hanging it in the correct, upright position. Indeed, I found two different copies: one printed from the Enduring Questions Database specifically formatted for the page (marked “Print”) and one as it appeared while reading the article onscreen (marked “Web”).

Both now appear in the “Files” section below.

All the best—Jason

Enduring Question

• Was There Ever a Golden Age of Television?

Quick Response

• The only honest answer to this question is “perhaps” because, no matter how final it sounds, the term Golden Age poses unique problems for cultural observers.

1. Golden Ages

The numerous golden ages that art historians, musicologists, theatrical scholars, literary critics, and media theorists extol in their writing are, to recall George Steiner’s memorable comment about the unending literary analyses of Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial, “cancerous.”1 References to golden ages multiply so quickly in academic and popular discourse that even diligent readers can’t track them all, much less fathom the maddening vagueness (and peerless narcissism) of identifying an era and its works as unswervingly marvelous. Proclaiming Periclean Athens an historical golden age, the period encompassing Bach’s cantatas and Beethoven’s symphonies a musical golden age, Elizabethan drama a theatrical golden age, and the Victorian novel’s prominence a literary golden age enshrines these periods, art forms, genres, and modes as indispensable contributions to human culture.

Golden ages, therefore, depend upon elitist, hierarchical, and exclusionary judgments. According to their proponents’ misty-eyed proclamations, golden ages embody human genius in ways so sublime that their reputations become unassailable. Doubting the reality of golden ages—whether art, architecture, brewing, cinema, comics, dance, drama, fashion, gaming, government, history, journalism, literature, music, sports, even needlepoint (this list could indefinitely continue)—mistrusts humanity’s nobility of purpose, capacity for greatness, and record of achievement. Only the most callous, jaded, or dyspeptic thinker would suggest that the term Golden Age, as a concept, remains an enabling fiction that cloaks subjective historical, artistic, and literary preferences in the mantle of objective truth.

To discuss the Golden Age(s) of American television, therefore, may seem oxymoronic. Robert J. Thompson, in the opening pages of his 1996 book Television’s Second Golden Age: From “Hill Street Blues” to “ER,” smartly describes this conundrum: “That Americans took early to calling the television set the boob tube and the idiot box says a lot about what they thought of what came out of it. The publicly voiced opinion of many thinking adults still holds that entertainment TV in general is usually at best a waste of time and at worst a toxic influence.”2 Television, to follow this line of argument, doesn’t edify its viewer, being neither good nor good for its audience, but instead offers mindless escapism to counter the hard realities of daily life. Television, in Todd Gitlin’s formulation, is “entertainer, painkiller, vast wasteland, companion to the lonely, white noise, thief of time,”3 or, in simpler language, a guilty pleasure that rarely (if ever) produces thoughtful art.

Persistent talk about the Golden Age of Television, however, defies Gitlin’s dismissive stance. Thompson defines this nostalgic idea in his book’s preface: “Ask anyone over fifty and they’re likely to tell you that they just don’t make television like they used to. Their eyes may glaze over as they recall the ‘Golden Age of Television’—a time stretching roughly from 1947 to 1960 when serious people could take TV seriously.”4 This notion—that television, like most features of American life, was better during the mid-20th Century—naïvely recalls a simpler, more conservative, and more comprehensible era where few people locked their doors; housewives gratefully stayed home; children played in large backyards; and filmed entertainment was elegant, decent, and refined.

This portrait of the American 1950s is a lie that disregards the political, social, economic, and cultural foment that characterized that decade. No one who seriously studies the Fifties, as David Halberstam attests in his 1993 book The Fifties, can escape the era’s complex combustibility, particularly when discussing its popular arts. Cinema, comics, photography, radio, and television chronicled a time of remarkable upheaval: the Civil Rights Movement, the Cold War, Europe’s postwar reconstruction, Africa’s early decolonization, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist ramblings, America’s military involvement in Korea, school desegregation, Fredric Wertham’s crusade against comic-book violence, the interstate-highway system’s construction, rapid suburbanization, and the expanding national-security state all contended for attention in the minds of busy Americans.

The staid reputation of mid-century America as a Golden Age preceding the 1960s’ angry activism, however, largely persists because televised comedies like The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (1952-1966), Leave It to Beaver (1957-1963), and The Donna Reed Show (1958-1966) depict the 1950s as a peaceful, even idyllic time in which the memories of World War II, the savageries of segregation, and the fears of nuclear annihilation rarely trouble the middle-class, white-picket-fence communities that remain the dominant image of Fifties America. Halberstam straightforwardly summarizes this sanitized representation: “By the mid-fifties television portrayed a wonderfully antiseptic world of idealized homes in an idealized, unflawed America. There were no economic crises, no class divisions or resentments, no ethnic tensions, few if any hyphenated Americans, few if any minority characters.”5 Television’s capacity to elevate America’s mid-century prosperity into near-utopia reciprocally cements the medium’s own standing as the purveyor of worthwhile entertainment that comforts its viewer by erasing everyday tensions, anxieties, and conflicts.

2. Golden Memories

American television’s first Golden Age, therefore, wasn’t as splendid as its later reputation suggests. Thompson acknowledges this truth by writing, “the TV of the 1950s continues to bask in the glow of selective recall. Most living Americans have no memory of what TV was really like back then, and only the good stuff is ever seen in reruns and in montage sequences on Emmy Award shows and network anniversary specials.”6 Fond recollections of comedy-variety programs like Milton Berle’s Texaco Star Theater (1948-1956) and Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows (1950-1954), along with happy memories of theatrical anthologies like Studio One (1948-1958) and Playhouse 90 (1956-1961), burnish the decade’s image as a time of mature small-screen content.

The major networks’ primetime programming schedules, however, contained much mediocre (and even laughable) fare. Marc Scott Zicree’s 1982 book The Twilight Zone Companion substantiates this claim by reprinting the Cincinnati Times-Star’s 12 November 1953 television guide to demonstrate that Rod Serling—six years before creating and producing one of the medium’s most innovative series, The Twilight Zone (1959-1964)—faced little competition as a serious dramatist. The program listings under the category Drama, cited by time and channel, offer compelling proof:

6:30 12—Superman’s secret identity is threatened by a gangster’s dog.

7:00 9—Captain Video advises Rangers to blast at full space speed.

7:30 9—Tom Conway stars as Inspector Mark Saber.

8:00 5—Joan complicates Brad’s hobby of collecting tropical fish.

8:30 9—Colonel Flack outswindles a tout at the racetrack.

8:30 5—“My Little Margie” causes “A Slight Misunderstanding” worth $35,000.

9:00 5—Cincinnatian Rod Serling’s “A Long Time Till Dawn”, story of tumultuous conflict in a young poet, is produced.7

That James Dean played this troubled poet further highlights the gap between Serling’s effort and its competitors. When Zicree comments, “Given this kind of comparison, it’s easy to see why young Serling, only twenty-eight in 1953, quickly gained the notice of both the public and a number of television critics,”8 the Golden Age of Television (these capital letters signaling its unchallenged significance) loses luster. No matter how good some programs were, others were dreadful.

The title of Thompson’s book, however, suggests that American television experienced at least two distinctly artful periods. If 1947-1960 constitutes television’s First Golden Age, then the era inaugurated by Hill Street Blues’s 15 January 1981 premiere begins what David Bianculli, in his 1992 book Teleliteracy: Taking Television Seriously, calls the “Platinum Age of Television.”9 Bianculli’s appellation not only compounds the definitional problems associated with the term Golden Age, but also indicates the growing perception among critics, scholars, and regular viewers that American television had achieved a sophistication rarely seen in earlier times (including the much-vaunted First Golden Age).

Hill Street Blues challenged its audience’s expectations of primetime drama by serializing storylines over multiple episodes. Grafting one of the soap opera’s fundamental narrative conventions onto the cop show’s urban adventurism allowed creators Steven Bochco and Michael Kozoll to develop characters, themes, and settings so precisely that Joyce Carol Oates, in TV Guide’s 1-7 June 1985 cover article, claims that Hill Street “is one of the few television programs watched by a fair percentage of my Princeton colleagues arguably because it is one of the few current television programs that is as intellectually and emotionally provocative as a good book. In fact, from the very first, Hill Street Blues struck me as Dickensian in its superb character studies, its energy, its variety; above all, its audacity.”10 These words, written by a celebrated American novelist, praise Bochco’s and Kozoll’s series while indirectly christening American television’s Second Golden Age as the province of novelistic narratives that actively subvert televisual conventions.

Oates ignores the debt that Hill Street owes to perhaps the most bastardized television genre of all—the daytime soap opera—to announce the arrival of a thoughtful, artistic, and valuable weekly series that emerges out of the “vast wasteland” that “Television and the Public Interest,” FCC Chairman Newton N. Minow’s 9 May 1961 address to the National Association of Broadcasters, famously (and infamously) identified.11 Oates, like other mainstream and academic writers, downplays Hill Street’s televisual precursors to place the program in an august literary lineage that stretches back to the Victorian Age’s most famous novelist.

This tendency had become a tradition by 1995, when New York Times Book Review editor Charles McGrath, in an article titled “The Triumph of the Prime-Time Novel,” states, “TV is actually enjoying a sort of golden age—it has become a medium you can consistently rely on not just for distraction but for enlightenment.”12 This declaration precedes a sober analysis of Law & Order (1990-2010, 2022-Present), Picket Fences (1992-1996), Homicide: Life on the Street (1993-1999), NYPD Blue (1993-2005), Chicago Hope (1994-2000), and ER (1994-2009) as valuable contributions to American culture. McGrath goes even further by identifying primetime television drama as “one of the few remaining art forms to continue the tradition of classic American realism, the realism of Dreiser and Hopper: the painstaking, almost literal examination of middle- and working-class lives in the conviction that truth resides less in ideas than in details closely observed. More than many novels, TV tells us how we live today.”13

When the editor of the Times Book Review—a person dedicated to assessing the quality of printed literature for America’s most prominent readership—employs the term Golden Age to describe primetime American television as a realistic medium, no concerns about that term’s utility can long survive. Robert J. Thompson’s book, released one year after McGrath’s article, capitalized on a growing trend—influenced by academic treatises, popular-press debates, and watercooler discussions—that television had passed an important threshold to become a serious, significant, and insightful medium.

Even so, the above provisos, doubts, and suspicions can’t belie the sense that, during the 1980s, American television left its adolescence to develop more adult, complex, and relevant storytelling. Such cautions also fail to hide the habit of the medium’s most passionate advocates to proclaim their present moment as the true Golden Age of Television. For example, the decade of the 1950s—with its theatrical anthologies, Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-1962), Naked City (1958-1963), and The Twilight Zone—first laid claim to provocative programming.

The 1960s, producing even more series for viewers to watch, saw The Defenders (1961-1965), East Side/West Side (1963-1964), The Outer Limits (1963-1965), The Fugitive (1963-1967), Star Trek (1966-1969), The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (1967-1969), Mission: Impossible (1966-1973), and Julia (1968-1971)—among others—expand the narrative conventions, parameters, and intricacy of televised comedy and drama. The 1970s saw situation comedies bloom into significant venues for social criticism, satire, and parody, with the later seasons of The Carol Burnett Show (1967-1978), The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-1977), All in the Family (1971-1979), The Bob Newhart Show (1972-1978), M*A*S*H (1972-1983), Good Times (1974-1979), and Taxi (1978-1983) blending topical storylines (or comedy sketches) with biting humor, while, in the same decade, Columbo (1971-1978 & 1989-2003), Kojak (1973-1978), Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974-1975), and The Incredible Hulk (1977-1982) refreshed the detective, cop, newspaper, and comic-book genres.

The 1980s made adult storytelling a requirement of its best dramas and comedies by seeing Hill Street Blues (1981-1987), Cagney & Lacey (1981-1988), St. Elsewhere (1982-1988), Cheers (1982-1993), The Equalizer (1985-1989), Moonlighting (1985-1989), Frank’s Place (1987-1988), Wiseguy (1987-1990), Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994), China Beach (1988-1991), and Quantum Leap (1989-1993) achieve critical and popular success after arriving on network schedules or in first-run syndication (with The Next Generation establishing an alternative business model to the network and cable outlets that, by the decade’s conclusion, were available in many American homes). Thompson argues that Dallas (1978-1991) “gave memory to the entire medium”14 to establish the multi-episode story arc as a narrative convention that allowed primetime television to replicate more closely the literary effects of good novels.

The 1990s, therefore, so handsomely benefited from these developments that this decade produced television drama and comedy that regularly challenged, confronted, enlightened, and mystified its audience, with Twin Peaks (1990-1991 & 2017), Oz (1997-2003), and The Sopranos (1999-2007) encompassing the 1990s’ provocative programming. Law & Order began in 1990 (with its first spinoff series, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, debuting in 1999), while January 1993 saw two complicated, intricate, and insightful series—Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993-1999) and the aforementioned Homicide: Life on the Street—premiere.

The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. (1993-1994), NYPD Blue (1993-2005), and The X-Files (1993-2002, 2016, & 2018) also arrived in 1993 to offer innovative approaches to old genres. Millennium (1996-1999)—thanks to sharp writing and Lance Henriksen’s masterful performance as criminal profiler Frank Black—profoundly explored the origins of human violence, spirituality, and religion, while Frasier (1993-2004) combined sophisticated dialogue with family melodrama to produce a superlatively acted sitcom. The West Wing (1999-2006) made national politics appointment drama even as the short-lived American Gothic (1995-1996) and Nowhere Man (1995-1996)—like The X-Files and Millennium—offered wicked satires of American paranoia to raise narrative ambiguity into high art.

3. Golden Cages

The 21^st Century’s inaugural decade boasted so many terrific—even groundbreaking—programs that referring to the 2000s as American television’s true Golden Age became a common refrain among viewers, critics, and scholars. 24 (2001-2010 & 2014), The Shield (2002-2008), The Wire (2002-2008), Karen Sisco (2003-2004), Arrested Development (2003-2006, 2013, & 2018-2019), Deadwood (2004-2006 & 2019), Battlestar Galactica (2004-2009), Invasion (2005-2006), The Office (American remake, 2005-2013) Brotherhood (2006-2008), Friday Night Lights (2006-2011), 30 Rock (2006-2013), Dexter (2006-2013), Big Love (2007-2011), Californication (2007-2014), Breaking Bad (2008-2013), Mad Men (2008-2015), Parks and Recreation (2009-2015), and Treme (2010-2013) are all fascinating examples of television narrative, in some cases problematic, but just as frequently masterful—if not outright masterpieces.

If we trust reviews, scholarly articles, and message-board postings published between 2000 and 2010, Arrested Development is the situation comedy’s apotheosis, while The Wire is a work of television genius. This list could expand, but the point is that, although no single year or decade qualifies as American television’s Golden Age because this term is an elitist canard, references to the Golden Age of American Television—whenever it happens to be—will continue, just as identifying the Golden Age of Television in other nations will surely proceed. The tendency to announce golden ages, after all, is not exclusively American, with British series Fawlty Towers (1975-1979), The Office (British original, 2001-2003), and Doctor Who (1963-1989, 1996, & 2005-Present) achieving as much praise as any American program.

Since the 1970s, premium- and basic-cable channels, DVD and Blu-ray technology, and streaming services have challenged the major television networks’ monopoly over producing, distributing, and broadcasting primetime television. The result is an era, beginning in 1981, that’s offered audiences more provocative programs than any prior point in history although every previous decade can boast its share of complicated, challenging, and skillful series.

And the term Golden Age remains problematic for another reason. Every decade since television’s inception as a narrative medium has produced programs so terrible that they’re best forgotten: My Mother the Car (1965-1966); Full House (1987-1995); Baywatch (1989-2000); and Walker, Texas Ranger (1993-2001) are obvious offenders. Mediocre television seems more prevalent than either exceptional or execrable series, so no purified Golden Age of Television has ever existed (just as, by this criterion, no cultural Golden Age has ever existed).

Still, thanks to the digital availability—on demand, on disc, and online—of vast amounts of American television, along with cable channels devoted to broadcasting older television (Nick at Nite, TVLand, and MeTV are only three examples), viewers have never had a better opportunity to refresh themselves about the cultural heritage that television represents. The existence of so many sophisticated, thoughtful, and challenging programs allows the medium’s admirers to make an argument unimaginable during the 1960s: People should watch more television—or at least more great television—to better understand, appreciate, and enjoy the medium’s pleasures and possibilities.

Although we’ve passed the day when that global communication system known as “the Internet” has outstripped television as humanity’s most pervasive, influential, and profitable mass medium, the fact that—if only you search long and hard enough for it—so much television produced in every nation and language is available somewhere online testifies to TV’s enduring popularity, longevity, and influence.

The upshot to these observations is that debating the dates of the Golden Age (or Golden Ages) of Television seems less intriguing—and certainly less fun—than discussing television’s best work, so, with this proviso in mind, I issue this clarion call:

Stream on, dear reader, stream on!

FILES

Vest, Jason: "Out of the Twilight Zone_American Television Comes of Age" (Print Version)

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Read Jason Vest's "Out of the Twilight Zone: American Television Comes of Age" as it originally appeared in ABC-CLIO's Enduring Questions Database on 1 September 2010. This version is specifically formatted for the page.

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Vest, Jason: "Out of the Twilight Zone_American Television Comes of Age" (Web Version)

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Read Jason Vest's "Out of the Twilight Zone: American Television Comes of Age" as it originally appeared in ABC-CLIO's Enduring Questions Database on 1 September 2010. This version is printed directly from the screen (thereby recreating this essay's appearance when reading it onscreen).

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Bianculli, David: Teleliteracy_Taking Television Seriously (1992)

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Read David Bianculli's 1992 book Teleliteracy: Taking Television Seriously (published by Continuum Books).

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Gitlin, Todd (Editor): Watching Television_A Pantheon Guide to Popular Culture (1986)

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Read Todd Gitlin's 1986 edited collection Watching Television: A Pantheon Guide to Popular Culture (published by Pantheon Books). Gitlin's introduction, "Looking Through the Screen," runs from Pages 3-8.

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Halberstam, David: Fifties, The (1993)

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Read David Halberstam's 1993 book The Fifties (published by Villard Books).

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Kafka, Franz: Trial, The (Introduction to Definitive Edition by George Steiner) (1992)

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Read Schocken Books's 1992 "Definitive Edition" of Franz Kafka's 1925 novel The Trial. George Steiner's introduction runs from Pages vii-xxi.

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Thompson, Robert J.: Television's Second Golden Age_From "Hill Street Blues" to "ER" (1996)

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Read Robert J. Thompson's 1996 book Television's Second Golden Age: From "Hill Street Blues" to "ER" (published by Syracuse University Press).

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Zicree, Marc Scott: Twilight Zone Companion, The (1982)

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Read Marc Scott Zicree's 1982 book The Twilight Zone Companion (published by Bantam Books).

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• Bianculli, David. Teleliteracy: Taking Television Seriously, Continuum Books, 1992.

• Gitlin, Todd. “Look Through the Screen,” in Watching Television: A Pantheon Guide to Popular Culture, edited by Gitlin, Pantheon Books, 1986, pp. 3-8.

• Halberstam, David. The Fifties, Villard Books, 1993.

• McGrath, Charles. “The Triumph of the Prime-Time Novel,” New York Times Magazine, 22 October 1995, pp. 52+, http://www.nytimes.com/1995/10/22/magazine/the-prime-time-novel-the-triumph-of-the-prime-time-novel.html?pagewanted=all.

• Minow, Newton M. “Television and the Public Interest,” Address to the National Association of Broadcasters, 9 May 1961, http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/newtonminow.htm.

• Oates, Joyce Carol. “Why Hill Street Blues Is Irresistible,” TV Guide, 1 June 1985, pp. 5+.

• Steiner, George. Introduction to The Trial: The Definitive Edition by Franz Kafka, Schocken Books, 1992, pp. vii-xxi.

• Thompson, Robert J. Television’s Second Golden Age: From “Hill Street Blues” to “ER,” Syracuse University Press, 1996.

• Zicree, Mark Scott. The Twilight Zone Companion, Bantam Books, 1982.

FURTHER READING

• Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” In Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, translated by Edmund Jephcott, first published in 1947, Stanford University Press, 2002, pp. 94-136.

• Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, Schocken Books, 1968, pp. 217-251.

• Berger, John. Ways of Seeing, first published in 1972, British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 2003.

• Canby, Vincent. “From the Humble Mini-Series Comes the Magnificent Megamovie,” New York Times, 31 October 1999, http://www.nytimes.com/1999/10/31/arts/from-the-humble-mini-series-comes-the-magnificent-megamovie.html?pagewanted=all.

• Edgerton, Gary R., and Jeffrey P. Jones, editors. The Essential HBO Reader, University Press of Kentucky, 2008.

• Fiske, John. Television Culture, first published in 1987, Routledge, 2006.

• Gitlin, Todd. Inside Prime Time, first published in 1983, University of California Press, 2000.

• Graham, Allison. Framing the South: Hollywood, Television, and Race during the Civil Rights Struggle, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.

• Gray, Herman. Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness, first published in 1995, University of Minnesota Press, 2004.

• Lavery, David, editor. Reading Deadwood: A Western to Swear By, Reading Contemporary Television Series, I.B. Tauris, 2006.

• Longworth, James L., Jr. TV Creators: Conversations with America’s Top Producers of Television Drama, Syracuse University Press, 2000.

• Lotz, Amanda D. The Television Will Be Revolutionized, first published in 2007, 2^nd edition, New York University Press, 2014.

• Mander, Jerry. Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, first published in 1978, Perennial, 2002.

• McCabe, Janet, and Kim Akass, editors. Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond. I.B. Tauris, 2007.

• Mittell, Jason. Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture, Routledge, 2004.

• Newcomb, Horace, editor. Television: The Critical View, first published in 1976, 6^th edition, Oxford University Press, 2000.

• Peacock, Steven, editor. Reading “24”: TV Against the Clock, Reading Contemporary Television Series, I.B. Tauris, 2007.

• Rapping, Elayne. Law and Justice as Seen on TV, New York University Press, 2003.

• Siegel, Lee. Not Remotely Controlled: Notes on Television, Basic Books, 2007.

• Spiegel, Lynn, and Jan Olsson, editors. Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition, Duke University Press, 2004.

• Jarvis, Robert M., and Paul R. Joseph, editors. Prime Time Law: Fictional Television as Legal Narrative, Carolina Academic Press, 1998.

• Steyn, Mark. “The Maestro of Jiggle TV,” The Atlantic, September 2006, pp. 146-47.

• Teachout, Terry. “The Myth of ‘Classic TV,’” in A Terry Teachout Reader, Yale University Press, 2004, pp. 174-77.

• Torres, Sasha, editor. Living Color: Race and Television in the United States, Duke University Press, 1998.

• Vande Berg, Leah, Lawrence A. Wenner, and Bruce E. Gronbeck. Critical Approaches to Television, Houghton Mifflin, 2004.

• Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form, first published in 1974, Routledge, 2003.

• Yeffeth, Glenn, editor. What Would Sipowicz Do?: Race, Rights and Redemption in “NYPD Blue,” BenBella Books, 2004.

NOTES

Homicide: Life on the Street

• Created by Paul Attanasio

• Based on Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets by David Simon

• Starring Daniel Baldwin, Ned Beatty, Richard Belzer, Andre Brauger, Reed Diamond, Giancarlo Esposito, Michelle Forbes, Peter Gerety, Isabella Hofmann, Želko Ivanek, Clark Johnson, Yaphet Kotto, Melissa Leo, Toni Lewis, Michael Michele, Max Perlich, Jon Polito, Kyle Secor, Jon Seda, and Callie Thorne

• Guest Starring Ami Brabson, Erik Todd Dellums, Gerald F. Gough, Wendy Hughes, Clayton LeBouef, Harlee McBride, Ellen McElduff, Walt McPherson, Austin Pendleton, Kristin Rohde, Ralph Tabakin, Judy Thornton, Sean Whitesell, and Sharon Ziman

• 122 one-hour episodes & 1 two-hour telefilm

• Original broadcast 31 January 1993 — 21 May 1999 (series) & 13 February 2000 (telefilm)

1. Off-Air Adventures

Perhaps the cruelest irony of television’s Streaming Era is that, despite the abundance of small-screen entertainment now available to us all at all hours of all days (and all nights), some fondly remembered programs elude discovery no matter how hard we search for them.

Two terrific series from the American 1990s have never been available on any streaming service despite their seminal status (well, seminal to me and plenty of other people): Paul Attanasio’s Homicide: Life on the Street (1993-1999) and Chris Carter’s Millennium (1996-1999).

Both shows received season-by-season DVD releases during the 2000s, then series-spanning DVD box sets during the 2010s, but, with time’s passage, these items’ availability has waxed and waned given the effort, energy, and expense required to secure music rights and other permissions from Homicide’s and Millennium’s broadcast lives.

The result?

The purchase prices of Homicide and Millennium DVDs have skyrocketed on Amazon, eBay, and other online auction sites, which is unsurprising and depressing for fans unwilling or unable to shell out the necessary cash.

That’s a polite way of saying that both programs’ most-ardent admirers have been out of luck for so long they’d come to accept that—short of illegal downloads and unlicensed streaming from various websites I won’t name here (but that you can locate with only a little online sleuthing)—they’d never see these sterling series again. Sure, Court TV picked up Homicide for daily broadcasts (a process known as “stripping”) after its original NBC run concluded in 1999, but these repeats petered out after only a few years, just as the now-defunct Chiller TV service rebroadcast Millennium for a year or two after Chiller’s 2007 launch.

Yet how many people—other than nutcases like myself—remember the brief afterlives of two of the best dramas ever to appear on American television?

Millennium fans, I’m sorry to report, remain hard-up vis-à-vis streaming, but Homicide aficionados can now rejoice. The entire series (plus Homicide: The Movie, the 2000 telefilm that saw all 20 principal Homicide cast members from across the program’s seven seasons—including performers who’d departed five and six years prior—unite to close one final case) is now available on Peacock, NBC’s aptly named streaming service.

2. On-Air Adaptations

Although Peacock first made Homicide available on 19 August 2024, I somehow missed all the hoopla surrounding this blessed event, including Eric Deggans’s short-but-thoughtful All Things Considered interview with Homicide’s showrunner, the redoubtable Tom Fontana, about why the program still matters. Having written a book about David Simon,1 author of 1991’s Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (the text that inspired Fontana’s series), that devotes an entire chapter to Homicide: Life on the Street (addressing not only its production but also its relationship to its source material), I really should’ve known that Homicide was returning to television one-quarter of a century after it departed our collective airwaves.

Indeed, I’d been revisiting, during 2024’s eventful summer, one of Homicide’s spiritual, if not actual, predecessors—Richard Levinson’s and William Link’s incomparable Columbo (1971-2003)—by savoring this older program’s episodes and, especially, Peter Falk’s remarkable portrayal of the Los Angeles Police Department’s (LAPD’s) Lieutenant Columbo (among the greatest performances ever given by any actor in any medium). So I nearly jumped for joy when I saw, one early September evening after activating Peacock to screen yet another Columbo telefilm, that Homicide was now available for streaming.

Columbo forgotten, I immediately began binge-watching Homicide, ripping through its first two seasons (of only 13 episodes, nine from Season 1 and four from Season 2) in just one day, discovering along the way that, while Peacock had remastered each episode’s audiovisual tracks (good), it hadn’t secured the rights to all the songs heard during the show’s network run (not so good). The audiovisual clarity of Peacock’s version of Homicide is impressive even if Peacock’s grandees decided to alter the series’ original 4:3 aspect ratio to fit the widescreen televisions that’ve become standard home appliances in the decades since Homicide was produced for those boxy TV sets we all once owned (and, strictly speaking for myself, loved).

This change has been admirably managed, with Peacock’s technical gurus somehow not sacrificing Homicide’s jump-cutty, innovative-in-its-day cinematography to the pan-and-scan priorities2 of the VHS Era, that 25-year period spanning the late 1970s to the early 2000s, when videotapes spawned an entirely new way of watching, first, films and, later, television series that’d previously been relegated to premium cable channels like Home Box Office (yes, some of us actually called it that rather than HBO) and Cinemax (or, as it was known to precociously prurient teenagers like myself, Skin-E-Max) unless you stayed up late, into the wee hours, to watch local-access TV stations run public-domain movies in six- and eight-hour blocks (the 1959 Vincent Price shocker The Tingler was a particular favorite, probably because it cost nothing—or next to nothing—for these stations to license) or were lucky enough to receive, on your basic-cable system, TBS (no one, in my memory, ever called it the Turner Broadcasting System—too many syllables), enabling you to enjoy endless reruns of the 1982 Marc Singer cult classic The Beastmaster, which for many years seemed to be the only movie that TBS owned, at least until Bob Clark’s 1983 holiday staple A Christmas Story came along and, a few years later, founder Ted Turner disastrously chose to “colorize” black-and-white classics like Michael Curtiz’s 1941 Casablanca and John Huston’s 1941 adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s 1930 novel The Maltese Falcon.

And Peacock’s Homicide, to extend this discussion, sometimes looks even grainier than its broadcast version, while the missing music forces Peacock to incorporate replacement songs that can grate the nerves of faithful viewers who watched the show during its 1993-2000 NBC run and, years later, watched it all over again after purchasing the complete-series boxset (I’m a card-carrying member of both clubs).

For instance, the beautifully written, performed, and filmed Season 3 episode “The Last of the Watermen” (first broadcast on 9 December 1994) brilliantly integrated the Counting Crows’s 1993 song “Raining in Baltimore” into two montages—of Detective Kay Howard (Melissa Leo) driving to and away from her hometown of Tighlman Island, Maryland—only to have Peacock insert a song titled “Your Heart is the Lighthouse,” from an album titled Rescue Me that I’ve only located on SyncStories, a website that describes itself as “a one-stop music licensing and publishing company for TV, Film and Interactive Media,” but that doesn’t list the female singer’s name, only the songwriters (Eric Andrew Taylor & Lance Winnor Conrad), meaning that Peacock went with “library music”—i.e., songs compiled for the express purpose of replacing the commercial music whose rights the studios, the networks, and the streaming services can’t secure, can’t afford, or both—rather than ponying up the cash that the Counting Crows (or, more likely, Geffen Records and its corporate master, Universal Music Group) demanded.

Now, “Your Heart is the Lighthouse” works well enough in context, both underscoring and counterpointing Kay Howard’s forlorn trip home, but this track doesn’t achieve the matchless poetry of “Raining in Baltimore” undergirding melancholy images of Kay fleeing Baltimore for her childhood stomping grounds only to depart Tighlman Island soon after investigating a murder that implicates old friends, old boyfriends, and even family members.

3. In-the-Air Accolades

Homicide, to state the matter plainly, is one of four American television series—the others are Rick Berman’s & Michael Piller’s 1993-1999 Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Steven Bochco’s & David Milch’s 1993-2005 NYPD Blue, and Chris Carter’s 1993-2018 The X-Files—that helped establish 1993 as a watershed year for small-screen television drama. This notable TV season created and imbibed the hopeful-yet-melancholy, forward-looking-yet-backward-gazing vibes so unique to the early 1990s that, with the Reagan Years ending and the Clinton Era looming, they became halcyon days for people who, hoping to surmount the Me!-Me!-Me! excesses of 1980s’ America, found their quest for new beginnings and their dreams of a better future relapsing into the neo-conservative bullshit and civic ennui that we’ve endured ever since.

That’s not the sunniest place to conclude 2025’s inaugural Vestibule post, but, then again, Homicide isn’t the sunniest television series to relish now that the new year has begun. As showrunner Tom Fontana’s joked many times since Homicide’s demise, whenever NBC programming executives asked him, “Where are the life-affirming moments that’ll keep viewers coming back for more?,” he always replied that Homicide, perhaps television’s ultimate downer title, ruled out happy endings no matter how much these network suits wished otherwise.

And what can one say in reply to this statement besides, “Right on, Tom”?

No, the real reasons to watch Homicide again—or, dear reader, for the first time (and to those people, you can’t imagine how jealous I am that you get to experience this fabulous work of art as freshly as I once did)—are: 1) to be impressed by how influential this program’s approach to cop dramas has become in the subsequent decades and, most importantly, 2) to marvel at how terrific are its writing, its production, and, especially, its acting.

Homicide, after all, is the program that launched Richard Belzer’s remarkable run as John Munch (not only one of the longest-running characters to appear on American primetime television—the third-longest, in fact, after fellow Law & Order: Special Victims Unit co-stars Mariska Hargitay’s Olivia Benson and Ice-T’s Odafin Tutuola—but also the character who’s appeared on more television series than anyone else in primetime history)3 and that brought three late-great film actors—Ned Beatty (1937-2021), Yaphet Kotto (1939-2021), and Jon Polito (1950-2016)—to series television in prominent roles that helped redefine their careers.

The aforementioned Melissa Leo won the 2010 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress (for David O. Russell’s The Fighter) and the 2012 Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series (for Louis C.K.’s Louie), although she should’ve gotten her first Emmy for playing Kay Howard so well in Homicide that, when this character exits the program in its fifth-season finale (“Strangers and Other Partners”), the show goes on, but loses the formidable spark that Leo gives it every time she talks.

And, of course, there’s the late-great Andre Braugher’s superlative work as Detective Frank Pembleton, among the greatest characters ever to grace an American television drama thanks to Braugher’s coruscating brilliance in this role and, it goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyway), to the writing staff’s genius in giving Braugher (1962-2023) the words necessary to bring Pembleton to such lucid and vivid life. Viewers who only know Braugher from his final, equally great TV role (as Captain Raymond Holt in Dan Goor’s & Michael Schur’s 2013-2021 workplace comedy Brooklyn Nine-Nine) might be shocked to see Braugher playing it straight as Pembleton, a Black New Yorker who prefers living in the “Brown town” of Baltimore, Maryland, and whose unsparing interrogations of homicide suspects (inside a room nicknamed “The Box”) are the inevitable highlights of any episode that features them.4

Braugher is so excellent as Pembleton that we must praise how good Kyle Secor is as Detective Tim Bayliss, Pembleton’s partner for most of Homicide’s first six seasons and the fresh-faced rookie who arrives in “Gone for Goode,” the series premiere, so eager to please that his earnestness makes Bayliss the immediate target of the squad room’s mockery. Secor’s ability to match Braugher’s intensity is nowhere better seen than in the program’s sixth episode, “Three Men and Adena,” set almost exclusively inside “The Box” as Pembleton and Bayliss interrogate, over a grueling twelve-hour session, a man named Risley Tucker, the chief suspect in the murder of 11-year-old Adena Watson who’s played to perfection by the late-great Moses Gunn (1929-1993) in his final screen performance.

Tom Fontana won the 1993 Emmy Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Writing a Drama Series for this installment’s script, which so confidently breaks cop-drama conventions that Bayliss and Pembleton fail to secure a confession from Tucker, who, in “Three Men and Adena’s” fabulous final act, begins interrogating the detectives’ insecurities before walking away from a crime that, like its real-life counterpart in David Simon’s book (the 1988 murder of 11-year-old LaTanya Kim Wallace), the squad never solves (violating the cop-show cliché of giving closure to every case even if the perpetrator isn’t punished).

So remarkable is “Three Men and Adena” that it moves critic John Leonard to declare, in Theodore Bogosian’s 1998 Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) documentary “Anatomy of a Homicide: Life on the Street” (a 71-minute, cradle-to-grave examination of how Season 6’s episode “The Subway” is produced), that “Adena”

was the most extraordinary thing that I have ever seen in a television hour. Just these three people and the overflowing black ashtray and the coffee cups that seem to be filled with amphetamines and spiders, the tension built up and the reverse torque of the two cops, and then, when Gunn himself went after them and found their weak points and completely reversed the psychology of the show, and they did not succeed, and I looked at that and I thought, “That’s better than Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden on Broadway, that’s better than a number of Don DeLillo novels about what happens to men in small rooms,” this was really wonderfully achieved. Big-city contemporary problems: wonderful stuff.5

Endorsements don’t get any better than this panegyric to an hour of television so powerful that I include Fontana’s teleplay in nearly every university course I teach as an example of beautiful writing (screenwriting, to be sure, but also writing, full stop).

I go could go on and on (and on) about how fantastic nearly every episode and nearly every actor in Homicide’s seven-season run is. Clark Johnson makes Detective Meldrick Lewis one of the lankiest, funniest, and coolest police officers in the history of American television and, to boot, began his thriving directorial career with Homicide’s Season 4 episode “Map of the Heart.” Indeed, Johnson became so good a director that he helmed the 2002 pilot episodes and the 2008 series finales of two later cop dramas that also redefined the genre (namely, Shawn Ryan’s The Shield and David Simon’s The Wire). And Toni Lewis, a late (fifth-season) arrival, shines as Detective Terri Stivers, making me regret that she’s appeared in only 11 film-and-television productions since Homicide went off the air.

Did you know that the great Giancarlo Esposito played FBI-agent-turned-Baltimore-homicide-detective Mike Giardello, son of Yaphet Kotto’s Al Giardello, in the show’s seventh-and-final season (plus Homicide: The Movie), showing attentive viewers just how good he was in the years before essaying the role of drug kingpin Gustavo “Gus” Fring (in Vince Gilligan’s 2008-2013 series Breaking Bad and in Gilligan’s & Peter Gould’s 2015-2022 prequel/sequel, Better Call Saul), to say nothing of the other television programs and movies (including four cinematic collaborations with Spike Lee) in which Esposito’s starred since Homicide ended?

I could (and might) write an entire essay about the local actors that give Homicide the look, sound, and feel of the hometown production that it was, filming as it did in the Fells Point neighborhood’s Recreation Pier, with Baltimore performers Sharon Ziman (executive producer Barry Levinson’s sister) and Judy Thornton (as, respectively, Homicide Squad secretaries Naomi and Judy) being only two of numerous area actors that appeared on the show during its seven-year shoot.

Yet that’s the future.

For now, let’s cheer Levinson’s and Fontana’s masterpiece—and, yes, it’s unquestionably a masterpiece—returning to television after a 25-year interregnum (while hoping—against hope, it seems—that Chris Carter’s Millennium will soon receive similar treatment).

That’s among the best new-year’s gifts I can imagine, so, as my first Peacock binge-watch of Homicide: Life on the Street comes to a close, I wish everyone a happy, healthy, and Homicide-infused 2025.

FILES

Homicide 1.1: "Gone for Goode" Shooting Script (by Paul Attanasio)

15.4MB ∙ PDF file

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Read Paul Attanasio's teleplay for Homicide: Life on the Street's series premiere, "Gone for Goode." This 65-page script is marked "As Broadcast" and bears the draft date 31 January 1993.

Download

Homicide 1.6: "Three Men and Adena" Final-Draft Script (by Tom Fontana)

1.28MB ∙ PDF file

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Read Tom Fontana's Emmy Award-winning teleplay for Homicide: Life on the Street's sixth episode, "Three Men and Adena." This 63-page script is marked "Final Draft" and bears the draft date 3 November 1993 (with yellow revisions dated 11/16/1993).

Download

Homicide 6.4: "The Subway" Revised Script (by James Yoshimura)

3.36MB ∙ PDF file

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Read James Yoshimura's teleplay for "The Subway," Homicide: Life on the Street Season 6's fourth episode. This 65-page script bears the draft date 13 August 1997 (and pink revisions dated 8/25/1997).

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NOTES

Note to The Vestibule’s subscribers: Upon recently realizing that 20 years have passed since David Milch’s HBO masterpiece Deadwood premiered on 21 March 2004, I experienced one of those “where has the time gone?” moments that regularly afflicts 52-year-olds like myself (in other words, people who can’t quite believe that we’re not still striplings who, in our 20s and 30s, are just beginning to build our careers and to enjoy our lives in the ways that, we’re told, proper adults should).

Rather than writing a new essay about Deadwood’s brilliance, I instead revisited the (fifth) chapter of my 2010 scholarly monograph—“The Wire,” “Deadwood,” “Homicide,” and “NYPD Blue”: Violence Is Power—devoted to Milch’s series. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I hate this book’s title despite valuing its extended study not only of David Milch’s but also of David Simon’s career as a television auteur and social realist. Indeed, that appellation was forced upon the book (and upon me) by its publisher’s marketing department despite my manuscript bearing the title American Savagery (and despite the three phone “conversations” between myself, my editor, and said marketing department that nearly degenerated into verbal Pier-Six brawls).

Even so, upon re-reading this long, ll-oo-nn-gg, lll-ooo-nnn-ggg piece, I realized that my thoughts and opinions about Milch’s program haven’t changed over time. If anything, they’ve strengthened, especially considering how well Deadwood: The Movie, the follow-up telefilm that HBO premiered on 31 May 2019, completes Deadwood’s story. This lovely, 110-minute return to the the richly imagined world of Milch’s series reunites every living cast member 13 years after the program’s unintentional finale (in Season 3’s “Tell Him Something Pretty”), serving not merely as its final chapter but also as a valedictory salute to Milch’s four decades of television writing.

Suffice to say, Deadwood remains one of the greatest examples of American art produced during the 21st Century, so I now present you Chapter Five of Violence Is Power, titled “American Savagery” (we writers, among the greatest packrats known to humanity, never waste a good idea if we can get away with it) and aligned with The Vestibule’s house style. I’ve broken the original piece’s too-long paragraphs into more digestible chunks, included relevant images alongside useful links, and massaged the prose where necessary.

Here are two brief usage notes: 1) The first time you see a character’s name, you’ll also see the performer’s name in parentheses immediately afterward, and 2) The first time you see an episode’s title, you’ll see its place within Deadwood’s overall chronology in parentheses immediately afterword—for example (1.1) and (3.12)—with the first number designating the season and the second number designating the installment: 1.1 refers to Season 1’s first episode, while 3.12 indicates Season 3’s twelfth episode.

Please find the published chapter and many other relevant documents in the “Files” section. And be warned: substantial screen-scrolling awaits you. Deadwood’s brilliance, however, justifies this long excursion into David Milch’s wonderful, filthy, and indelible masterwork.

Plus, if this long essay moves even one reader to watch (or to re-watch) Deadwood and Deadwood: The Movie, then I’ll declare victory rather than regretting the many paragraphs that you, dear reader, must endure on the way to finishing this piece.

All the best—Jason

Deadwood

• Created by David Milch

• Starring Ian McShane, Timothy Olyphant, Jim Beaver, Seth Bridgers, W. Earl Brown, Dayton Callie, Larry Cedar, Kim Dickens, Brad Dourif, Anna Gunn, John Hawkes, Peter Jason, Geri Jewell, Jeffrey Jones, Paula Malcomson, Gerald McRaney, Molly Parker, Leon Rippy, William Sanderson, Bree Seanna Wall, Robin Weigert, Titus Welliver, Keone Young, and Powers Boothe

• Guest Starring Franklin Ajaye, Kristen Bell, Keith Carradine, Brian Cox, Garret Dillahunt, Josh Eriksson, Cynthia Ettinger, Richard Gant, Omar Gooding, Allan Graf, Zach Grenier, Ricky Jay, Cleo King, Pasha D. Lychnikoff, Ray McKinnon, Timothy Omundson, Sarah Paulson, Ralph Richeson, Brent Sexton, Stephen Tobolowsky, Pruitt Taylor Vince, and Alice Krige

• 36 one-hour episodes & 1 two-hour telefilm

• Original broadcast 21 March 2004 — 27 August 2006 & 31 May 2019 (on HBO)

1. Westward Ho?

Deadwood (2004–2006) is David Milch’s highest achievement as a fiction writer, social realist, and television dramatist. This three-season HBO series, first pitched to the network as “St. Paul gets collared,”1 explores, interrogates, and elaborates three significant themes: 1) How law emerges from lawlessness; 2) How order emerges from chaos; and 3) How America’s savage founding gives way to the idea, necessity, and reality of community.

Milch, in the words of Mark Singer’s 6 February 2005 New Yorker profile “The Misfit,” originally “wanted to write about the lives of city cops in ancient Rome during Nero’s reign, before a system of justice had been codified.”2 Since HBO was developing the series Rome (2005–2007) for broadcast when Milch proposed Deadwood in 2002, Carolyn Strauss and Chris Albrecht, the network’s top executives, asked Milch to locate the same themes elsewhere. Milch, who’d proposed a Western series to NBC in 2001 that never materialized,3 began researching life in the Old West, finally focusing on Deadwood, the notorious Black Hills mining camp that arose in 1876 after gold was discovered by an 1874 expedition commanded by George Armstrong Custer.

Deadwood was located on Dakota Territory land originally deeded to the Lakota Sioux Indians. Milch, by setting his series in Deadwood, chooses a locale famous for its brazen, flagrant, and unrepentant illegality. The gold rush that brought Caucasian prospectors to sacred Native American territory recapitulated the nation’s tradition of officially sanctioned thievery, making Deadwood a nexus of licentiousness, criminality, and vice.

Deadwood, therefore, falls in line with Milch’s other major contributions to television drama—Hill Street Blues (1981-1987) and NYPD Blue (1993-2005)—despite its different genre. Singer calls Deadwood “an unlike-any-Western-you’ve-ever-seen Western” in “The Misfit,”4 an assessment that seems fitting for a television series that, on the surface, features few identifiable cowboys-and-Indians motifs, many unconventional violent encounters, and meager trappings from traditional cinematic and television Westerns. Deadwood has provoked ample commentary about how the program demolishes the conventional Western that graced American television screens during the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s, setting Milch’s program apart from the simplistic, good-versus-evil portrait of the American West that Gunsmoke (1955–1975), Wagon Train (1957–1965), The Rifleman (1958–1963), Bonanza (1959–1973), and The Big Valley (1965–1969) epitomize.

Deadwood’s graphic violence, sex, and profanity, according to this argument, distinguish it from all previous television Westerns, even programs such as The Wild Wild West (1965–1969) and The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. (1993–1994) that ridicule, parody, or satirize the genre. Milch occasionally endorses this viewpoint in interviews, behind-the-scenes documentaries, and panel discussions about Deadwood, believing that the traditional Western originated in Hollywood’s desire to sanitize American history by offering the nation a mythical, noble, and purified past.

In “The New Language of the Old West” and “An Imaginative Reality,” two behind-the-scenes documentaries included in Deadwood’s Season One DVD and Blu-ray sets, Milch tells Keith Carradine, the actor who plays Wild Bill Hickok in the program’s first five episodes, that the traditional Western reflects Hollywood’s Hays Production Code as much as authentic American history.5

Milch’s 5 March 2005 interview with Salon.com’s Heather Havrilesky elaborates his notion that the experience of immigrant Jews largely generated the Hollywood Western as we know it today:

The idea of the western, I believe, as people conceive of it, is really an artifact of the Hays Production Code of the ’20s and ’30s and it has really nothing to do with the West, and much to do with the influence of middle-European Jews who had come out to Hollywood to present to America a sanitized heroic idea of what America was. The first term of the Hays Code is that obscenity in word or fact or action is an offense against God and man6 and will not be depicted. In the early ’20s there were starting to be films that were kind of racy and these guys didn’t want their hustle to be jeopardized.7 So they formed this production board which essentially announced that, let us run the show and we will give you an America disinfected and pure.8

Commerce, in Milch’s judgment, drove Hollywood’s major movie studios to produce Westerns that reassured their audiences about America’s glorious past. This decision, according to Milch, also counteracted the “real vein of anti-Semitism and misgiving”9 that developed during the 1920s and 1930s, fostered by Charles Lindbergh’s and Henry Ford’s warnings against the social, economic, and political power of “the money lenders,” a common euphemism for Jewish bankers, merchants, and entrepreneurs.

“The dream factory was operated exclusively by immigrant Jews,” Milch says, explaining to Havrilesky that studio moguls like Samuel Goldwyn and Louis B. Mayer wanted to “stay sort of behind the scenes. . . . So, what these guys did was come up with a four-square American kind of vision with an unwritten guarantee: Let us run the show, and you will get 150 features a year which glorify innocence and the absence of conflict and so on.”10

Milch’s sense that Hollywood Westerns are, in effect, parables of assimilation—stories that symbolically chronicle how immigrants become Americans by courageously confronting a wild frontier—clues the critical viewer into one of Deadwood’s profoundest ironies: Assimilation, civilization, and law, in Milch’s series, are merely byproducts of the ceaseless quest for profit, not noble ideals inherent to the American character or nation.

Milch is even more forthright about his intentions in Deadwood: Stories of the Black Hills, the book that he published in 2006 during the program’s third (and final) season. Confessing that he didn’t wish to write a contemporary drama after the events of 11 September 2001, Milch states that he settled on a story about Deadwood because “the camp came together in the mid-1870s, deep into the Industrial Revolution, and yet it was a reenactment of the story of the founding of America, and a reenactment, too, of the story of Original Sin. I suppose I accept [Nathaniel] Hawthorne’s definition of Original Sin as the violation of the sanctity of another’s heart.”11

Conflating the sacred and the profane within historical fiction, per this analysis, allows Milch to dramatize the uncomfortable, unfortunate, and ugly realities of America’s birth as a political, economic, and civic entity. Deadwood and Deadwood enact America’s founding by indulging the basest forms of avarice, theft, brutality, and murder as necessary adjuncts to securing wealth, land, and political supremacy.

Violating the sanctity of another’s heart not only suggests trampling an individual’s rights but also evokes the historical crimes of land dispossession, human bondage, and cultural genocide that, despite politically conservative attempts to deny them, are significant aspects of American history. Deadwood, for Milch, emerges as a fictional attempt to come to terms with shameful historical truths that traditional Westerns don’t merely minimize, but fully overlook.

2. Genre & Genius

Not all critics, however, credit Milch’s appraisal of the Hollywood Western as accurate or Deadwood’s revisionist tendencies as groundbreaking. Lee Siegel, in his 29 March 2004 New Republic review of Deadwood (reprinted in Siegel’s 2007 book Not Remotely Controlled: Notes on Television), calls statements about how Deadwood shatters the conventions of the traditional Hollywood Western “hysterical proclamations of cultural revolution” that ignore the genre’s rich history.12

“The tired old genre of the Western,” Siegel writes, is a “hackneyed American invention, we are told, in which evil is purely evil and good purely good, the difference between them usually indicated by sneering, black-hatted villains and tight-lipped, white-hatted heroes.”13 Such characterizations, Siegel implies, simplify the Western’s underappreciated complexity: “Except, that is, for Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven and Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, made way back in 1992 and 1989, respectively, both of which, we are further told, also shattered the tired old genre of the Western.”14

Anthony Mann’s and Sam Peckinpah’s contributions to the genre, by motioning toward greater realism, seem revolutionary because, in Siegel’s estimation, the Western idealizes the American past (here Siegel agrees with Milch). Deadwood, for Siegel, only appears to redefine Western conventions rather than breaking the genre’s narrative strictures: “The seeming paradigm-bursting change introduced by Deadwood, however, is really no more than an extra-emphatic expression of a single element. Which in the case of Deadwood, and so many other so-called innovative shows, is the seamy, sordid side of life.”15

Siegel’s world-weary tone typifies his facile reviews, but he correctly notes that Deadwood participates in a revisionist tradition that deconstructs the Western’s mythic nobility. Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man (1970), Clint Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter (1973), and Kevin Costner’s Open Range (2003) are just three additional films that expose the violence, racism, sexism, and immorality of life in the Old West. Deadwood, therefore, may not stand alone in repudiating the traditional Western’s reputation for simplistic morality, but it defies Siegel’s misguided declaration that “take away the show’s moderate (by current standards) sex and violence, and its immoderate cussing, and Deadwood is really a very enjoyable, good old-fashioned cowboy series whose characters are, in the end, no more discomfiting than characters in more conventional-seeming cowboy movies.”16

Siegel’s seen-it-all-before attitude reveals his critical myopia, for Deadwood’s approach to sex and violence is far from moderate, while Milch’s program exceeds the old-fashioned cowboy series that Siegel invokes but refuses to name. Critical viewers cannot mistake Deadwood for Gunsmoke, Wagon Train, Bonanza, or The Big Valley—or seriously place it in the same category of television drama as these earlier shows— because Deadwood, as Jason Jacobs notes, is a “filthy joy” to behold.17

Even so, Siegel usefully suggests that Milch’s analysis of the Western’s generic development overlooks many contrary examples, to say nothing of the extensive literary tradition that the Western enjoyed before migrating to radio, cinema, and television. Dime novels that chronicled the exploits of real-life Western celebrities like Wild Bill Hickok and fictional characters like Deadwood Dick were popular in 19th-Century America, while novelists from Owen Wister and Zane Grey to Louis L’Amour and Larry McMurtry have enjoyed tremendous success writing Western fiction (with Wister’s 1902 novel The Virginian, Grey’s 1912 novel Riders of the Purple Sage, L’Amour’s 1955 novel Guns of the Timberlands, and McMurtry’s 1985 novel Lonesome Dove being consummate contributions).

Milch admits to little initial familiarity with cinematic and television Westerns, telling Salon’s Heather Havrilesky, “It wasn’t that I didn’t like them; it’s just I didn’t watch them particularly. When I was growing up, it was not the heyday of the western.”18 We must, of course, doubt this final statement’s veracity, since Milch, born in 1945, came of age in an era when each year averaged between 40 and 60 Western films, with more than 600 Westerns produced between 1950 and 1959.19

Plus, so many Western series were part of network television during Milch’s teenage years that he could only avoid them by pointedly refusing to watch the “horse operas” that ABC, CBS, and NBC broadcast by the dozens. Milch, we may infer, omits references to Western novelists and short-story writers from his comments because he preferred other genres on the page and on the screen.

Milch, however, became an avid student of the genre during the two years he researched Old West history while preparing Deadwood. This extensive reading taught Milch that he needn’t react against the Western’s established conventions because

I was mystified when I began to do the research. It seemed so obvious to me that the West I was encountering . . . had nothing to do with the westerns, which I was experiencing secondhand, which weren’t even good on their own terms. But then going back and seeing the classical westerns, those, too, had nothing to do with the West I was studying.20

Milch thinks his early generic ignorance “turned out probably to be a good enough thing” because the traditional Western “had everything to do with what Hollywood was about at that time, and nothing to do with what the West was about.”21

No matter how distant Milch feels from classical film and television Westerns, observers like Lee Siegel and John Leonard note that his series nonetheless reproduces their broadest conventions. Leonard’s 11 March 2004 New York Magazine review of Deadwood, for instance, sees it as part of a long lineage: “From Homer and the Bible to John Ford, men are hanged, women raped, and children stolen by savages because of turf wars, sexual property rights, and different ideas on how to look good dying. Sometimes, too, a sheep is dipped. Not even Deadwood fiddles with this Western formula.”22 Milch’s protestations to the contrary cannot change Siegel’s and Leonard’s opinion that Deadwood is more traditional, more conventional, and more usual than its creator, producers, and audience recognize.

Horace Newcomb’s thoughts about Deadwood—chronicled in the 2008 academic anthology The Essential HBO Reader—complicate attempts to determine the program’s generic freshness even more than Siegel’s assurances that Milch’s series, despite its revisionist tendencies, evokes the traditional Western. “The structure of the conventional western,” Newcomb writes, “is the movement from savagery to civilization. . . . So-called revisionist westerns undercut this narrative by showing how truly difficult the process can be, how ‘the winners’ in this contest must often engage in corruption as deeply as those who lose.”23

Newcomb’s analysis implies that Deadwood “is not a western at all, neither conventional nor revisionist. The ease with which Milch transferred his thematic exploration from one setting [ancient Rome] to another [Deadwood] confirms this. It is the ‘people’ who interest him; it is improvisation in the absence of law.”24 Milch’s desire to examine how law develops from lawlessness, for Newcomb, “is an abstract concept if ever there was one. But the abstraction is made concrete by context, by the social impulse. And that impulse is defined. It is the attempt,” Newcomb says, quoting Milch’s words in Singer’s profile of him, “‘to minimize the collateral damage of the taking of revenge.’”25

Deadwood, however, remains a revisionist Western (according to Newcomb’s terms) no matter how much attention the series pays to its characters. Milch’s program repeatedly dramatizes how civilization and savagery aren’t dichotomies but instead interpenetrate one another during the mining camp’s evolution from illicit settlement to legal municipality. The impulse to restrain vengeance and vendettas, moreover, underscores other notable Western novels, films, and television series—including Lonesome Dove, Unforgiven, and Gunsmoke—that, like Deadwood, engage social, political, and moral questions.

Perhaps the single most important forerunner of Milch’s series is Pete Dexter’s masterful 1986 novel Deadwood, which combines obscene language, graphic sexuality, chilling violence, and mordant wit into a grim narrative leavened by gallows humor.26 Milch doesn’t credit (or even mention) Dexter’s novel in interviews, documentaries, DVD commentaries, or Stories of the Black Hills, but Dexter’s example unquestionably influences Milch’s effort. The novel slowly reveals Charlie Utter—Wild Bill Hickok’s loyal friend (and the character played by Dayton Callie in Milch’s series)—to be its protagonist, while the section devoted to the Chinese prostitute Ci-an (known colloquially as the China Doll) includes details that Milch’s Deadwood assigns to the character Mr. Wu (Keone Young) and to the area of town called Chink’s Alley (even if the Chinese prostitutes in Milch’s series are minor—even insignificant—characters who never speak on their own behalf).

3. Language & Frontier

Milch’s Deadwood, therefore, is neither wholly original nor utterly conventional. It casts a jaundiced eye on the myth of the American frontier, or the idea that sophisticated European society’s heroic confrontation with, struggle against, and triumph over the North American continent’s vast wilderness (and its Indigenous peoples) forges an exceptional, exemplary, and unitary American identity that transforms European refinement into an inveterate pragmatism while enshrining white society as America’s most authentic population.

The young nation, according to this legend, discards its primitive impulses (by marginalizing the African slaves and Native Americans who symbolize undiluted savagery to the white frontiersmen venturing across the continent) to embrace a social compact that regulates human desire by outlawing deleterious behaviors like vengeance while licensing immoral actions, particularly bondage and land dispossession, that support Manifest Destiny’s expansionist project.

Milch’s series, therefore, ambivalently regards the frontier mythology that Frederick Jackson Turner lionizes in “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” his landmark address to the American Historical Association meeting held during Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Exposition (an event that celebrated the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s landing on the American continent).

This piece, perhaps the most famous essay ever written about the American West, invokes metaphors of political germ theory and microbiological evolution to assert, “Our early history is the study of European germs developing in an American environment” before making its signature declaration: “The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization.”27

This statement endorses the notion of civilized Europeans subjugating nature to their economic and political will, but not before the frontier changes their cultured manners into more elemental behaviors. Turner recognizes the symbiotic relationship between Americans and their physical environment by noting, “The wilderness masters the colonist. . . . Little by little he transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe, not simply the development of Germanic germs, any more than the first phenomenon was a case of reversion to the Germanic mark. The fact is, that here is a new product that is American.”28

The United States’s historical development, in other words, depends on flexibility, adaptability, and fluidity rather than fixed, stilted, and rigid identities. This American capacity for change produces unique cultural traits that Turner avidly chronicles. “That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness,” he writes, “that practical inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil”29 not only define but also embody the American character.

Deadwood is less sanguine about the frontier’s salutary effects on American identity, industry, and enterprise than Turner’s triumphal celebration of rugged individualism. The series exposes the camp’s energetic pursuit of gold, liquor, and sex as a barbaric façade that can’t fully sever America’s connection to its European ancestors. A scene from the pilot episode, simply titled “Deadwood” (1.1) and written by Milch, illustrates the camp’s complicated revision of those qualities that Turner defines as quintessentially American.30

Prospector Whitney Ellsworth (Jim Beaver) delivers gold to Al Swearengen, proprietor of the Gem Saloon, Deadwood’s largest and most profitable bordello. Swearengen, who in real life was born in Iowa, is played by English actor Ian McShane, and Ellsworth, after Swearengen calculates the gold’s value as $170, launches into a profanity-laden monologue that incorporates many terms from Turner’s essay:

ELLSWORTH: Now, with that Limey damn accent of yours, are these rumors true that you’re descended from the British nobility?

SWEARENGEN: I’m descended from all them cocksuckers.

ELLSWORTH: Well, here’s to ya, Your Majesty. I’ll tell you what: I may of fucked my life up flatter than hammered shit, but I stand here before you today beholden to no human cocksucker. And working a paying fucking gold claim. And not the U.S. government saying I’m trespassing or the savage fucking Red Man himself or any of these limber-dick cocksuckers passing themselves off as prospectors had better try and stop me.

SWEARENGEN: They better not try it in here.

ELLSWORTH: Goddamit Swearengen, I don’t trust you as far as I can throw you, but I enjoy the way you lie.

Ellsworth’s sarcasm dismisses Swearengen’s tenuous connection to British royalty before announcing his (Ellsworth’s) independence from all civic and moral authority. Only gold and the commodities it can purchase matter to him (Ellsworth tells Swearengen to inform the Gem’s card dealers and whores of his $170 credit before asking about Swearengen’s accent), while no restraints can contain Ellsworth’s declaration of total freedom from human, governmental, and historical obligation.

His speech’s casual contempt for federal authorities and implicit racism against Native Americans recall Turner’s statement that the frontier is “the meeting point between savagery and civilization”31 where nature must give way to culture, but not before the wilderness diminishes the civilizing tendencies of European settlers (and their descendants) to generate the dominant individualism that Turner and Ellsworth (who functions in this scene as the fictional avatar of Turner’s thesis) identify as exceptionally American.

Ellsworth, however, knows not to expect fair treatment from anyone, even the man who purchases his gold, in an illegal camp where no law exists. Milch’s script for “Deadwood” includes a detail that the scene as edited obscures. After Swearengen tells Ellsworth that his gold weighs 8.5 ounces, the script reads, “The camera’s CLOSER SCRUTINY reveals Swearengen’s thumb adjusting the scale’s balance in his favor,”32 but the episode’s viewer doesn’t see Swearengen cheating Ellsworth because the scene begins after Swearengen weighs the gold.

Director Walter Hill, while collaborating with Milch, may have found such visual confirmation unnecessary since Ellsworth’s final line, jauntily delivered by Beaver, alerts the viewer to Swearengen’s dishonesty. Beaver and McShane skillfully convey how both men recognize thievery as a fact of life in Deadwood, with Ellsworth implicitly preferring Swearengen’s brand of larceny to the depredations of prospectors who might rob his claim to offset their own losses.

The sexual violence of Ellsworth’s conversation with Swearengen, moreover, implies that Deadwood’s prospectors and entrepreneurs needn’t sublimate the virility that Turner’s “coarseness,” “strength,” and “restless, nervous energy” suggest is necessary to tame the frontier. The term cocksucker, first mentioned by Swearengen to repudiate his British ancestry, becomes, for Ellsworth, a way to distinguish his economic potency from the powerless, “limber-dick” prospectors who might steal his gold rather than pursuing their own busted claims.

Swearengen, by stating that no one should try to cheat Ellsworth while he patronizes the Gem Saloon, feminizes these hypothetical thieves even more by insinuating that they occupy a place beneath the Gem’s prostitutes who, rather than stealing from the camp’s male residents, offer sexual services in exchange for money. This arrangement’s suppression and exploitation of women’s freedom mirrors the suppression and exploitation of Indian rights that permit Ellsworth to mine gold in the first place, with Deadwood’s pilot episode occurring roughly two weeks after George Armstrong Custer’s 26 June 1876 defeat at the Little Bighorn.

Eroticizing the American confrontation with the frontier as a rape of the land, its Indigenous inhabitants, and their cultural heritage makes Ellsworth into the primary representative of this desire to master the natural, political, and historical forces in play. Ellsworth, indeed, utters language whose crudity, obscenity, and vulgarity shocks even audiences that, by Deadwood’s 21 March 2004 premiere, had become accustomed to the profanity that typifies HBO dramas like Tom Fontana’s Oz (1997-2003), David Chase’s The Sopranos (1999-2006), and David Simon’s The Wire (2002-2008).

Mark Singer, in his “Misfit” New Yorker profile of Milch, aptly recognizes that “the language on Deadwood ranges from Elizabethan-like ornateness to profanity of a relentlessness that makes The Sopranos seem demure. Both extremes often coexist in a single speech.”33 The inverted rhythms of Ellsworth’s monologue, particularly their tendency to place predicates before subjects, suggest an opulent quality that the speech’s unyielding profanity counteracts.

This vulgar discourse is the episode’s (and, therefore, Deadwood’s) first extended excursion into the spoken obscenity that not only characterizes the series but also provoked passionate controversy after the pilot episode’s initial broadcast. Milch has claimed many times that Deadwood’s profanity has firm historical roots, telling Keith Carradine in “The New Language of the Old West” behind-the-scenes special that “it’s very well documented that the obscenity of the West was striking, but the obscenity of mining camps was unbelievable.”

Ellsworth’s comments embody this judgment, particularly their absurd imagery and unlikely metaphors. How, for instance, does a person make such a mess of his life that it becomes “flatter than hammered shit”? The comparison here, like the notion of hammering manure, makes no logical sense but calls to mind, as Scott Eric Kaufman observes in his incisive Acephalous essay “Deadwood and To Whom Its Dialogue Is Beholden,” blacksmith iconography: Pounding an anvil becomes a metaphor for a hard life ruined “through long effort, through the labor evoked by the mention and soundscape of hammering.”34

Ellsworth, despite the gold he sells to Swearengen, confesses to wasting his life so badly that material wealth can’t undo the damage. Ellsworth’s plan to spend his money drinking, gambling, and whoring also indicates his desire to embrace the romance of the frontier rather than accumulating material wealth.

The freedom from legal authority that the frontier offers, however, can’t compensate for the failure that Ellsworth feels he’s become, leading the prospector to indict the federal government, the Indians, and the camp’s other prospectors for their imagined crimes against the unfettered life that he tries to carve from Deadwood’s unscrupulous environment. Ellsworth’s anger, hidden under his cheerful demeanor, unleashes a torrent of profanity that hammers this point home while eliminating the possibility of fellowship with the surrounding community. Ellsworth trusts no one, not even Swearengen, to understand, sympathize with, or care about his predicament.

Milch, in Stories of the Black Hills, states that the people who traveled to gold-strike camps sought linguistic and political liberation because “there has to be a cleaning away—the purgation of meaning that profanity permits,”35 meaning that obscene language paradoxically cleanses its speakers of their linguistic and political fetters.

Ellsworth’s monologue temporarily purges his disappointment, with its obscene language informing the viewer that this prospector—whose importance to Deadwood’s narrative increases until his third-season murder by agents of mining mogul George Hearst (Gerald McRaney) in “The Catbird Seat” (3.11) provokes shock, sorrow, and rage in the camp’s inhabitants—can’t reconcile his economic ambitions with the stark realities of surviving the frontier. Gold promises wealth, comfort, and serenity, but the unlikely possibility that Ellsworth will “strike it rich” forces him to realize just how hopeless his future is.

Ellsworth’s profanity, then, reveals a theatrical personality continually staging its own identity. This impulse to re-create oneself when encountering unfamiliar places is a prototypical American trait that Deadwood’s florid dialogue expertly captures. Such dialogue, moreover, is literary language as much as authentic 19th-Century speech, a point that Horace Newcomb lucidly acknowledges:

As presented by an outstanding cast, the language is most often described as Shakespearian [sic], and it is indeed important to note that the language is performed, not merely spoken. Subtle distinctions of diction and voice, vocabulary, and inflection serve to distinguish characters. Soliloquies and muttered musings offer insight into the psychology, the motivations and speculations, of individuals, but also into the relationships among them.36

Ellsworth and Swearengen, as linguist Geoffrey Nunberg comments, wouldn’t have talked in real life as Deadwood makes them speak because the profanity used by 19th-Century frontiersmen would have “had religious overtones rather than sexual or scatological ones,”37 but these characters’ conversation permits Jim Beaver and Ian McShane to refashion the stock Western characters of weary prospector and sly saloonkeeper into specific personalities that the viewer can’t mistake for any other individual in Deadwood’s massive cast.

Milch’s achievement in this regard won’t surprise anyone who recalls the memorable speech patterns of Hill Street Blues’s and NYPD Blue’s characters or who knows that Robert Penn Warren once favorably compared Milch’s dialogue to Ernest Hemingway’s,38 a faith justified by the linguistic richness that Ellsworth’s outwardly crude yet deceptively poetic words manifest. Milch’s shrewd casting also deserves praise, for only talented actors can bring alive Deadwood’s elaborate dialogue without indulging arch or campy performances that call attention to themselves.

The unexpected resonance of Ellsworth’s speech—no viewer who hears it, despite Lee Siegel’s opinion, can look on Deadwood as a conventional Western—illustrates Milch’s persuasive claim, made in Stories of the Black Hills, that “what follows [profanity] is a regeneration of meaning, so that words come to have a different meaning in a world that has been made new.”39

4. Law & Order?

Deadwood’s eccentric language, sex, and violence, as such, make its narrative world seem unexplored. The series includes no clichéd street standoffs or barroom brawls, thereby managing to refresh even hackneyed Western plot points. The pilot episode’s first scene, for instance, finds Montana marshal Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant) protecting Clell Watson (James Parks), a man sentenced to hang at dawn, from a mob that wishes to kill Watson before sunrise. Bullock is infuriated by the repeated threats of Byron Sampson (the mob’s leader, played by Christopher Darga) to storm the jail, injuring or even killing Bullock and his business partner, Sol Star (John Hawkes), in an effort to reach Watson.

Bullock intends to resign his position as marshal the next morning, after the hanging, so that he may travel to Deadwood and open a hardware business with Star, but Sampson’s intransigence makes Bullock’s plan impossible. This storyline, of an Old West peace officer defending a condemned man’s life before a town mob, is so familiar to regular viewers of Westerns that Deadwood initially strikes its audience as a run-of-the-mill entry in the genre.

This situation abruptly changes, however, when Bullock, seething with anger, carries out Watson’s sentence rather than fighting Sampson’s gang. Bullock fashions a noose to the jail’s front porch, telling Sampson that the execution will be carried out “under color of law.” Bullock asks Watson what message the man wishes to give his sister (who intends to attend the execution), writes these words onto a piece of paper, and then hangs Watson. The distance between the noose and the porch floor, however, is so short that Bullock tugs on Watson’s struggling body until the man’s neck breaks. Bullock then gives the paper to an onlooker who promises to deliver it to Watson’s sister, boards the fully packed wagon that Star drives, brandishes his weapon at Sampson, and rides out of town.

This unexpected development transforms an apparently trite scene into a disquisition about law, order, violence, and responsibility. Bullock’s determination to carry out Watson’s execution by legal means bespeaks his belief that order is necessary to maintaining civil society by quelling the violence that Bullock himself perpetrates when angered. After arriving in Deadwood, for instance, Star and Bullock unload their wagon in the middle of the street, to the chagrin of a loudmouth driver who can’t pass until they finish. The fellow yells, “This the first wagon you ever fucking unloaded? Hold onto my horse. I’ll show you how to do it,” causing Bullock to tell the man to stay where he is. When the man asks, “And what if I don’t?,” a belligerent Bullock moves toward him, saying, “Stand there mouthing off and you’ll find out.”

Bullock clearly intends to strike the man, but Star intervenes, offering the fellow a free chamber pot as an apology. Wild Bill Hickok and Charlie Utter pass by this confrontation, with Hickok noting Bullock’s ferocity. Later, while Star and Bullock hawk their wares outside the tent that serves as their temporary storefront, another man (Gill Gayle) attempts to steal business by claiming that he just bought a 50-cent soap bar with a five-dollar prize inside its wrapping. Bullock walks toward this shill, telling him, “Front your game away from our tent.” Bullock’s combative attitude intimidates the man, who moves down the street.

These incidents, beyond demonstrating Bullock’s temper, alert the viewer to his fundamental hatred of bullying, confidence games, and bad faith. Although Bullock settles in Deadwood to work as a merchant, not a lawman, he behaves so much like a peace officer that Hickok (a former Kansas marshal) instantly recognizes their similarity. A major storyline in the pilot episode concerns Hickok and Bullock leading a search party for the Metzes, a family that has been massacred while returning in their wagon to Minnesota along the Spearfish Road.

Ned Mason (Jamie McShane)—a road agent who works for Swearengen—reports that Indians slaughtered the family, but Hickok and Bullock suspect that the nervous and twitching Mason perpetrated the crime with unknown accomplices (who then double-crossed Mason, forcing him to return to Deadwood). Hickok, Bullock, Mason, Star, Utter, and the owner/editor of the Deadwood Pioneer newspaper, A.W. Merrick (Jeffrey Jones), ride to the site, finding that five-year-old Sofia Metz (Bree Seanna Wall), the only survivor, is barely alive.

They take the girl to Dr. “Doc” Amos Cochran (Brad Dourif ) in Deadwood, with Bullock and Hickok telling Mason to remain in town because Sofia, when she recovers, may implicate him in the murders. A truculent Mason pulls his weapon, but both Hickock and Bullock fire their guns first, shooting Mason in the eye. One of the pilot episode’s best moments occurs when, as Mason lies dead on the ground, Hickok asks, “Was that you or me, Montana?” and Bullock replies, “My money’d be on you.”

Although Deadwood (a camp that abrogates federal statute by sitting on land awarded to the Sioux Indians by the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty) has no formal laws, Hickok and Bullock preserve order by trying, convicting, and executing Mason in the street. Their violence satisfies Bullock’s need to secure justice by avenging the greater crime of killing an innocent family, then blaming it on Native Americans. Bullock, unable to outrun his past, restores order even though he left Montana to escape a marshal’s life.

Bullock becomes an unusual Western character in these scenes. He acts outside legal authority but behaves like a conventional lawman, with Milch, in Stories of the Black Hills, noting that the actual Seth Bullock was regularly beaten by his father, provoking a rage that made him despise the act of one human being bullying another. Bullock comes to believe that “the law is going to protect him [by] disinfect[ing] his own murderous rage,”40 but Deadwood’s lawless environment challenges Bullock’s assumptions. He discovers, in Milch’s words, that “law and order are not the same. . . . Our desire for order comes first, and law comes afterward.”41

Bullock must adapt to his new circumstances, discharging the sheriff’s duties although no such office yet exists in Deadwood. Bullock’s need to master his own anger drives him to pursue order, in private and public, just as Deadwood’s first season dramatizes how the camp begins ordering its civic affairs to become a functioning municipality so that residents may continue mining gold, selling goods, and accruing profit. Milch’s program illustrates how law arises from order, creating new obligations and responsibilities for its characters. Violence, Bullock’s pilot-episode trajectory illustrates, is as crucial to establishing the camp’s legitimacy as regulating violence is to sustaining its community.

This approach to screen mayhem converts the stock Western sheriff into a more thoughtful and brooding character whose taciturn nature belies his underlying passion. The resulting paradox creates fascinating drama as Deadwood unfolds. “Bullock’s capacity for violence and his impulse to order are conjoined in the same personality,” Milch writes in Stories of the Black Hills. “That’s the making of the new American hero.”42 Noting that the real Bullock became one of Theodore Roosevelt’s best friends, Milch argues that the future president helped develop the rhetoric of the West “in his book The Winning of the West. He (Roosevelt) based that rhetoric in some large part on Bullock’s character, including his anger as well as his habitual silence.”43

Bullock’s contradictory impulses, with order and disorder inhabiting the same body, therefore reflect the historical conflicts (freedom and bondage, democracy and authoritarianism, compassion and vengeance, generosity and greed) that inhabited Deadwood, making the camp, for Milch’s purposes, the perfect replica of America’s civic genesis and social development.

Language, as always in Deadwood, becomes central to depicting a town that develops a civilized veneer to cover the camp’s personal, political, and historical savageries. The program’s approach to frontier life is less a progression (or evolution) from barbarism to refinement than an admission that such progress shrouds in noble rhetoric the violence that helps create Deadwood’s municipal enterprise.

Bullock and Swearengen, for instance, appear diametrically opposed in their linguistic talents. Bullock, in Milch’s words, thinks that “language is a way that he bound up his rage” because Bullock is a “primitive” creature, not a lawman, who has “just emerged out of the primordial ooze, and he’s slouching around, barely able to control his impulses to wreak savage violence on whoever crosses the street the wrong way.”44

Swearengen, by contrast, indulges long soliloquies and monologues whose verbal dexterity often bemuses his listeners—especially henchmen like Dan Dority (W. Earl Brown), Johnny Burns (Sean Bridgers), and the educated Silas Adams (Titus Welliver)—as they hatch plans to rob, assault, or murder the people who thwart Swearengen’s attempts to consolidate power in Deadwood. Bullock and Swearengen, however, both utter words that meld violence, politics, sexual aggression, and profanity into examples of wounded masculinity that, as David Scott Diffrient observes, exude “vigor, rage, intensity, and authority” despite their expressive inadequacies.45

The scene preceding Bullock and Swearengen’s brutal fight in the second-season premiere, “A Lie Agreed Upon, Part I” (2.1), written by Milch, exemplifies this tendency.46 Bullock, although married to his brother’s widow, Martha (Anna Gunn), has pursued an affair with Alma Garret (Molly Parker), a New York–born woman who inherits a massive gold claim after Swearengen dispatches Dority to murder her husband, Brom Garret (Timothy Omundson), during the first-season episode “Reconnoitering the Rim” (1.3).

Alma, who’s also overcome a laudanum addiction with the assistance of Swearengen’s chief prostitute (and occasional mistress) Trixie (Paula Malcomson), has agreed to become Sofia Metz’s guardian. Swearengen, in “A Lie Agreed Upon, Part I,” insults Bullock—who accepted appointment as Deadwood’s sheriff in the previous episode, the first-season finale “Sold Under Sin” (1.12)—after Bullock emerges from Alma’s hotel following a tryst. Bullock glares at Swearengen, telling the saloonkeeper to remain at the Gem so that they can have words later in the day. Bullock, upon arriving in Swearengen’s office, learns that Deadwood’s political fortunes will change:

SWEARENGEN: We’re getting ass-fucked, carved into counties, but not one fucking commissioner coming from the [Black] Hills.

BULLOCK: How do you have this information?

SWEARENGEN: From the governor himself in a pricey little personal note. They want to make us a trough for Yankton’s snouts, and them hoopleheads out there [Deadwood’s miners], they need buttressing against going over to those cocksuckers. Now, I can handle my areas, but there’s dimensions and fucking angles I’m not expert at. You would be if you’d sheathe your prick long enough.

BULLOCK: Shut up.

SWEARENGEN: And resume being the upright pain in the balls that graced us all last summer.

BULLOCK: Shut up, you son of a bitch.

SWEARENGEN: Jesus Christ! Bullock, the world abounds in cunt of every kind, including hers. (Bullock glowers at Swearengen, then removes his badge and gun belt.) Of course, if it’d steer you from something stupid, I, uh, could always profess another position.

BULLOCK: Will I find you’ve got a knife?

SWEARENGEN: I won’t need no fucking knife.

Bullock and Swearengen then strike one another, beginning an altercation that sees them stumble onto Swearengen’s second-story balcony, tip over the balcony’s railing, and land in the main thoroughfare’s mud. Both men are injured, but the duplicitous Swearengen pulls a knife to stab Bullock, stopping only when he sees Bullock’s wife, Martha, and stepson, William (Josh Eriksson), staring at him through the window of a newly arrived stagecoach that has transported them from Michigan. “Welcome to fucking Deadwood!” Swearengen yells at mother and son before stumbling into the Gem Saloon. Bullock, who, despite a nasty cut to his head, seems less hurt than Swearengen, goes to his family rather than retrieving his badge and gun.

This confrontation has many ramifications: It sets the stage for Bullock and Swearengen’s eventual rapprochement, it forecasts the uneasy and tempestuous partnership they will form as Deadwood becomes a legally recognized part of the Dakota Territory, and, most important, it threatens Swearengen’s health. Swearengen, dismissing Dority and Adams after insulting Bullock early in the episode, grimaces when he feels pain in his side or groin. He stands over his chamber pot, futilely trying to urinate, when Bullock arrives to confront him for the insult. “Age impedes my stream, not fucking fear of you,” Swearengen says by way of greeting, informing the viewer that his body has betrayed him.

This detail is doubly important since it anticipates not only Swearengen’s messy and nasty fight with Bullock but also his subsequent debilitation by septic shock and kidney stones, resolved only when Cochran, in “Requiem for a Gleet” (2.4), inserts a metal probe known as a Van Buren’s sound into Swearengen’s urethra to allow him to pass the stones. This painful procedure requires Dority, Trixie, and Burns to hold Swearengen down while he screams and writhes in pain, much as he does while fighting Bullock. The parallelism between physical violence, bodily ailment, and moral sickness is a deliberate Milchian equation that, Erin Hill recognizes, stresses how “the representation of ailments on Deadwood . . . tends to saddle its afflicted with bodily troubles that match or force to the surface the troubles of their souls.”47

Swearengen and Bullock perpetrate physical violence against one another presaged by their verbal sparring during the first season (Swearengen, in the second episode, “Deep Water” [1.2], is upset that Bullock tries to negotiate a better deal for the lot—owned by Swearengen—on which Bullock and Star wish to build their hardware store, telling Bullock, in one of the series’s best moments, “Here’s my counteroffer to your counteroffer: Go fuck yourself!”48). Swearengen and Bullock, in other words, vent their turbulent inner lives in a spectacle of public aggression that their language forecasts and regulates.

Their conversation before the fight, for instance, fuses political corruption, rampant profanity, sexual crudity, open misogyny, and personal hostility into a scene of remarkable expressive power. This densely packed short dialogue, especially its references to numerous ongoing plotlines, exposes Milch’s talent for economical prose even while respecting the characters’ well-established personalities: Swearengen talks while Bullock glowers, seethes, and simmers.

Swearengen’s contempt for women drives this discussion forward, extending the man’s discomfort with bodily fluids into the realm of sexuality. Bullock’s coitus with Alma disturbs Swearengen not because it offends him (a hypocritical position for any brothel owner to hold), but because, to Swearengen’s mind, such copulation distracts Bullock from his sworn duty to protect the camp, which includes defending the economic interests on which Swearengen parasitically preys. Swearengen’s dialogue includes no fewer than seven allusions to genitalia, intercourse, fellatio, and anal sex, all within the political context of the Black Hills being divided into counties by a distant government that awards no representation to the camp’s residents.

This linguistic formulation juxtaposes anxieties about urological, excremental, and sexual impotence with fears of governmental, administrative, and bureaucratic marginalization. Swearengen’s hatred of women (“cunt of every kind” is perhaps the most misogynistic declaration in Deadwood’s 36 episodes) reveals his fury that Yankton feminizes the camp by making it a passive spectator to its own fate.

Swearengen, the pimp and whoremaster accustomed to enforcing his will over defenseless women, becomes one of their number in the Dakota Territory’s ruthless political economy (a connection extended by Swearengen’s first words to Dority upon recovering from the kidney-stone procedure: “Did you fuck me while I was out”49) . The unfamiliar and distasteful sensation of being controlled, ignored, and degraded provokes rage in Swearengen, who targets Bullock’s active sexuality as an improper response to the bureaucratic rape—the ass-fucking—that Deadwood, in Swearengen’s opinion, has experienced.

Swearengen routinely invokes anal sex to describe unwelcome events that disempower their victims. When Cy Tolliver (Powers Boothe), freshly arrived in camp, prepares to open the competing Bella Union casino and brothel in “Reconnoitering the Rim,” Swearengen combines latent homophobia with anti-Indian racism to describe Deadwood’s viability as an ongoing commercial enterprise:50

TOLLIVER: How long you been in camp, Al?

SWEARENGEN: Well, this year, Cy, since March. I was here last year, too, but the fucking cavalry drove us out.

TOLLIVER: Put all the whites out, didn’t they?

SWEARENGEN: Oh, deep fucking thinkers in Washington put forward that policy. This year, though, so many soldiers deserting to prospect, give up the ghost and let us all back in. And, of course, Custer sorted out the fucking Sioux for us, so now we’re all as safe as at our mothers’ tits.

TOLLIVER: Did a job for our side, didn’t he, Al?

SWEARENGEN: How about that longhaired fucking blowhard, huh? I’ll tell you this, son, you can mark my words: Crazy Horse went into Little Bighorn, bought his people one good long-term ass-fucking. (Swearengen pumps his fist back and forth.) You do not want to be a dirt-worshipping heathen from this fucking point forward.

Swearengen, rather than seeing Custer’s famous defeat as a debacle, thinks it may benefit Deadwood because the federal government will pursue a revenge campaign against the Sioux, a perception proved true in “Sold Under Sin” when General George Crook (Peter Coyote) leads a detachment of soldiers into town for rest and provisions before seeking reprisals against all Native Americans living in the Dakota and Montana territories (even if they didn’t participate in the Battle of the Little Bighorn). Swearengen represents Native Americans as sexual inferiors who must endure a violation they can’t prevent, resist, or stop, thereby equating them with two other minority populations that Swearengen loathes: women and homosexuals.

Swearengen applauds the passivity that “ass-fucking” implies for the Sioux (McShane relishes the word by enthusiastically enunciating it) but derides the subservience that he (along with Deadwood’s residents) must endure after Yankton decides to partition the Black Hills into counties without consulting the local populace. Swearengen’s comments in both “Sold Under Sin” and “A Lie Agreed Upon, Part I” suggest that Deadwood’s political destiny is a form of sexual trauma that not only plays out on a municipal scale but also demonstrates how the camp’s (and region’s) body politic can be abused and dismembered by the Dakota Territory’s paternalistic government.

Milch and his writers draw Deadwood’s master themes together in these sequences to meld sex, violence, profanity, and history into a dizzying fictional reproduction of the American frontier. Singer accurately writes in “The Misfit” that, during the 1980s and 1990s, Milch “had enormous success, critical and otherwise, writing for television, . . . and Deadwood demonstrates that his narrative gifts have deepened,”51 a judgment that the program’s intelligent, ambivalent, and elliptical approach to the Western substantiates. Deadwood, despite its self-consciously literary dialogue, strikes the viewer as an authentic portrait of 19th-Century American frontier society by depicting a fractured, incomplete, and quarrelsome community that constructs itself from base, vulgar, and unpleasant elements that defy the sunny rhetoric that Frederick Jackson Turner, Theodore Roosevelt, and other Western apologists promulgate.

This unvarnished presentation is plausible precisely because it evokes a complex, lived-in West rather than the disinfected environment of the traditional Westerns to which Milch objects. Deadwood, indeed, challenges simplistic symbolic readings by including vivid details that reward multiple viewings. “The symbolic, the allegorical, is always generated out of the particular,” Milch writes in Stories of the Black Hills to argue that surface meanings are incomplete: “I never thought of the name Swearengen as connected to his profane language, any more than I thought of Bullock as bull-headed . . . or anything of the sort. It is the life of this fiction, of the world of Deadwood, that generates these similarities. Symbols generate their meaning out of the closed system of a fiction.”52

The violence, profanity, sexuality, and historical backdrop that typify Deadwood, in other words, create realistic effects by inventing a fiction that resonates with lived experience. Viewers may not experience Deadwood as they do consensual or quotidian reality, but the program’s autumnal tone not only counteracts Bullock’s and Swearengen’s objectionable behavior but also reflects the mature style that Milch, his writers, his cast, and his production staff achieve.

5. Democracy & Desire

Deadwood’s attempt to chronicle the camp’s day-to-day existence leads Milch to compare his series to literature of an earlier era. “The number of characters in Deadwood does not frighten me,” he writes in Stories of the Black Hills. “The serial form of the nineteenth-century novel is close to what I’m doing. The writers who are alive to me, whom I consider my contemporaries, are writers who lived in another time—Dickens and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Twain.”53

This claim may seem pretentious for a man working in television, but it indicates Milch’s narrative ambitions and accomplishments as he makes Deadwood a long, interconnected, and dense story. This novelistic approach, while not new (Deadwood’s 2004 premiere was preceded by daytime soap operas; Murder One, a series for which Milch served as creative consultant in its first season; Oz; The Sopranos; 24; and The Wire, among other examples), forces viewers to pay attention to detail, to accept a different (and more languid) narrative pace, to track numerous intersecting storylines, and to negotiate the program’s literary effects.

Joseph Millichap finds Robert Penn Warren’s literary influence upon Milch decisive in this final regard, stating that “like the best of Warren’s works, Milch’s finest creations, especially Deadwood, employ a distinctive, diverse, and mannered style to delineate a harshly naturalistic vision of the dark and divided depths within the American national character, an identity simultaneously and paradoxically both innocent and corrupted.”54

The literary lineages that Millichap traces in “Robert Penn Warren, David Milch, and the Literary Contexts of Deadwood,” the finest essay yet written about this theme, prove that Milch’s demand for historical accuracy in settings, costumes, and music supplements his political, psychological, and moral vision for a program in which Deadwood represents America’s genesis, development, and expansion. Milch, by pursuing this narrative project, resembles Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Twain because all four novelists create wildly imaginative worlds that employ realism and naturalism to legitimize their fictional enterprise. Deadwood succeeds because Milch and his writers honor the literary legacy that these authors (along with Penn Warren) impart to produce a disturbing, resonant, and evocative television series.

Deadwood, as Singer notes, is a more mature work than even NYPD Blue. Despite their similar concerns (racism, sexism, law enforcement), both programs occupy distinct positions in Milch’s development as a television dramatist. Their perspective on legality distinguishes them from one another, with NYPD Blue presenting law enforcement as a frequently disturbing, always difficult, yet finally noble effort to regulate human desire that, for Richard Clark Sterne and other observers, adopts an nearly authoritarian sociopolitical stance.

Deadwood, however, portrays law as a corollary to economic, civil, and political order that shares the same vulgar basis as the criminality it ostensibly polices. Continuities exist (Bullock’s rigid outlook in Deadwood’s opening episodes, for instance, matches Detective Andy Sipowicz’s worldview in NYPD Blue’s early seasons), but Milch, in creating a lawless mining camp that predates NYPD Blue’s urban metropolis by one century, offers a more cynical appraisal of American commerce, politics, and jurisprudence. This paradoxical position—one would expect the police drama to be gloomier than the frontier Western—makes sense insofar as returning to the earlier era frees Milch from the 20th-Century historical events, developments, and influences that NYPD Blue inherits, while working for HBO frees Milch from network television’s censors.

This dramatic liberation gives weight to Newcomb’s contention that “Deadwood is not a western because it tells its tale by digging out the root elements of the western. It neither revises those elements nor replays them. It exposes the western, the genre itself, as an attempt to provide ‘endings’ that can never be true.”55 Deadwood, for Newcomb, becomes an anti-Western in the same manner that Leslie Fiedler, in his 1960 book Love and Death in the American Novel, sees Robert Penn Warren’s fiction about the American South’s antebellum and postbellum societies as attempting “the risky game of presenting to our largest audience the anti-Western in the guise of the Western, the anti-historical romance in the guise of the form itself.”56

This generic indeterminacy—Deadwood, after all, revises numerous Western conventions, embracing them even as it hollows them out—generates the complications that the series unveils to audiences that may find the program’s elliptical dialogue, unconventional pace, and odd characters mystifying. Viewers must return to individual Deadwood episodes to catch their nuances, details, and subtexts, a practice that HBO enabled during the program’s broadcast life by airing a single episode many times during a given week and, later, by releasing entire-season DVD box sets (Deadwood’s complete-series collection even resembles a thick novel to extend Milch’s invocation of 19th-Century authors as his literary forefathers).

Milch follows a reverse progression, moving from crime drama to Western drama, despite American television tracing the opposite path. The urban crime thriller, as David Simon notes in his introduction to Rafael Alvarez’s 2004 production history “The Wire”: Truth Be Told, “long ago became a central American archetype, and the labyrinth of the inner city has largely replaced the spare, unforgiving landscape of the American West as the central stage for our morality plays.”57

The career of Elmore Leonard, to take one well-known example, emblematizes Simon’s analysis. Leonard, one of America’s most prolific authors, began writing Westerns during the 1950s but became an eminent crime novelist during the 1960s (and continued writing crime dramas—sometimes heavily influenced by Western motifs—until his death on 20 August 2013). Milch’s career, however, goes against this trend to examine the origins of America’s political, legal, and economic structures. Deadwood, in Ned Martel’s memorable phrase, gets down in “the muck from which [law enforcement’s] basic concepts and rituals began to evolve. The town’s attempt to govern itself is corrupt, sporadic and bloody, as the main characters attempt—and often fail—to impose some stability on the society they are building.”58

Deadwood, by making Swearengen and Bullock its protagonists, continues Milch’s fascination with antiheroes. NYPD Blue’s Andy Sipowicz is the spiritual father of these characters, who frequently find themselves (despite their baser natures) demonstrating compassion, a trend that allows the camp to establish itself as a legitimate community rather than a lawless frontier town. The first motion toward Deadwood’s eventual municipal identity occurs during “Plague” (1.6), when a smallpox outbreak forces the camp’s “elite”— Swearengen, Star, Tolliver, Cochran, Merrick, bar owner Tom Nuttall (Leon Rippy), hotel owner E.B. Farnum (William Sanderson), and Reverend H.W. Smith (Ray McKinnon)—to convene a meeting to decide how to protect Deadwood’s healthy residents while treating the disease’s victims.

Their decision to set up a “pest tent” at the camp’s outskirts is far more charitable than Tolliver’s choice in the previous episode, “The Trial of Jack McCall” (1.5), to leave his associate Andy Cramed (Zach Grenier), a gambler and con man infected with smallpox, to die in the woods outside Deadwood’s perimeter. The meeting’s participants also volunteer money to pay riders to purchase vaccine shots in Fort Kearny, Nebraska; Bismarck, Dakota; and Cheyenne, Wyoming, which, in the episode “Suffer the Little Children” (1.8), they distribute free of charge to all residents.

Swearengen organizes and runs this meeting, held in the Gem Saloon, but doesn’t hold court in his usual fashion. He instead solicits opinions, makes suggestions for Merrick’s article about the outbreak (advocating benign misinformation that downplays the crisis’s severity), and accepts Reverend Smith’s advice not to stigmatize the disease’s victims.

This embryonic government, in Erin Hill’s words, “contains an answer to what is perhaps the central question of Deadwood, which is whether or not residents can be trusted to handle their business themselves without being regulated by a larger power, or, put more simply, whether order is possible without law.”59 This admirable civic-mindedness, however, is undemocratic. The camp’s inhabitants don’t elect this town council, but rather Swearengen, in the absence of election codes, appoints them by asking (in truth, commanding) the members to participate.

When, in “No Other Sons or Daughters” (1.9), word comes from Yankton that the federal government will sign a treaty with the Sioux Indians to annex the Black Hills to the Dakota Territory, Swearengen again assembles the town fathers—this time including Bullock and Tolliver’s right-hand man, Eddie Sawyer (Ricky Jay), but not the ailing Reverend Smith—to formalize their council.60

Only rudimentary democracy ensues. Swearengen, when telling Star about the meeting, says that the council must create an informal municipal organization (rather than an official government, which would suggest that the camp rebels against federal authority) with “structure enough to persuade those territorial cocksuckers in Yankton that we’re worthy enough to pay them their fucking bribes.” He then tells the assembled group that their organization will help miners, prospectors, and business owners keep title to their lands by becoming a legally recognized government whose “proper order of fucking business is to make titles and departments before the territorial cocksuckers send in their cousins to rob and steal from us.”

When Farnum, perfectly described by Mark Singer as “an oleaginous toady [who] lives suspended between mortal fear of Swearengen and mercenary eagerness to do his bidding,”61 asks to be mayor, Swearengen calls for objections and then, before Merrick can speak, pounds his hand on the table like a gavel to appoint—not elect—Farnum to this largely ceremonial position (no one doubts that Swearengen, who already acts as the meeting’s de facto chief executive, will continue in this role).

Farnum quickly proposes taxing the camp’s residents to pay the Dakota Legislature’s bribes, but Merrick nervously asks when elections will be held to replace the temporary council with permanent officials. After Farnum affirms that the council is ad hoc, the irritated Swearengen says, “Ad fucking hoc. . . . Can we just get on with the fucking meeting?”

Swearengen’s and Merrick’s opposing views illuminate Deadwood’s complex, ambivalent, and cynical rendering of America’s democratic origins. Swearengen, the pure pragmatist, finds government to be a necessary illusion that enables the camp’s residents to lay legal claim to the land they already occupy and the profits they already earn. Merrick, the romantic journalist, desires representative democracy that upholds the virtues of freedom and liberty he holds dear.

This conflict encapsulates the problems that the camp faces throughout the second season, when Francis Wolcott (Garret Dillahunt), a geologist employed by George Hearst, arrives to buy gold claims that prospectors such as Ellsworth work. Wolcott immediately enlists Tolliver to begin spreading rumors that all such claims will be declared invalid by the territorial government (since they violate the Fort Laramie Treaty), but that their owners may sell their land to Hearst for a fair price. This ruse is a confidence scheme that allows Hearst to acquire valuable land at little cost and that will result in hefty profits after Deadwood becomes a legitimate municipality.

This storyline also becomes Deadwood’s innovative spin on the conventional Western land-grab plot, being much more complex than the typical tale of a cattle baron running off innocent homesteaders. Hearst, the millionaire prospector who arrives in camp during the second-season finale, “Boy-the-Earth-Talks-To” (2.12), uses his wealth, influence, and power to rig the official elections that, much to Merrick’s delight, Yankton demands Deadwood hold to establish a permanent legal government and full rights under the territory’s auspices.62

The third season sees all major characters, particularly Bullock and Swearengen, align themselves (at first quietly and then more openly) against Hearst’s machinations. Deadwood’s experiment with democracy, therefore, melds Swearengen’s practical and Merrick’s ethical viewpoints into an alternately hopeful and disappointing movement toward self-rule that can’t escape the depredations of Hearst’s economic desire. His greed ensures that Deadwood, rather than ridding itself of the impure motivations that feed the camp’s development, expands the social, political, economic, and moral compromises that give it life.

6. Power & Pretension

The Hearst storyline most fully synthesizes Deadwood’s major themes, particularly the connection between money, violence, profanity, and community. The third season dramatizes Milch’s belief, stated in Stories of the Black Hills, that “before violence was anything else, it was simply a way of doing business.”63 The confrontation between Swearengen, Hearst, and Hearst’s chief enforcer, Captain Turner (Allan Graf), in “I Am Not the Fine Man You Take Me For” (3.2) embodies Deadwood’s sophisticated, if cynical, treatment of the relationship between wealth, power, and desire.64

Hearst, through Wolcott, has purchased nearly every gold claim in the camp but has failed to acquire the rights to Alma Garret Ellsworth’s massive strike (Alma, in “Boy-the-Earth-Talks-To,” marries Whitney Ellsworth—who manages her claim so well that she becomes rich enough to underwrite the camp’s first bank—to prevent the shame that news of her pregnancy by Bullock would entail). Hearst summons Swearengen to a meeting to discuss how to force Alma to sell, but Swearengen, knowing that such a decision could place the camp under Hearst’s perpetual control, refuses:

HEARST: I’ll not name how you would benefit from the action I wish you to take, saying only instead it’s my will, to which I will have you bend. (Hearst indicates a shot glass of whiskey on the table.) I suggest you drink that.

SWEARENGEN: No. (Behind Swearengen, Captain Turner produces a pistol.)

HEARST: I would incorporate into my holdings the claim now owned by Mrs. Ellsworth. I am told that you can help me bring this about. (Turner pistol-whips Swearengen in the back of the head, knocking Swearengen to the floor. Turner then grabs Swearengen from behind and pins Swearengen’s left hand on top of the table.) Tell me how you will help. (Hearst hefts a rock pick.) This is a grip I’m used to.

SWEARENGEN (fighting to stay conscious): Well, far as making your way into her, act averse to nasty language and partial to fruity tea. (Hearst, angered by Swearengen’s refusal, brings the rock pick down on Swearengen’s left hand. Swearengen gasps and collapses.)

Swearengen’s vulnerability is notable, with Hearst speaking to him much as Swearengen speaks to his own underlings, employees, and prostitutes. Bending Swearengen to his will underscores not only Hearst’s arrogance but also his symbolic sexual mastery of the camp’s ruling elite, here represented by Swearengen, who becomes a victim of the physical violence that he (Swearengen) customarily perpetrates against others.

Hearst’s talk of incorporation indicates his unappeased (and perhaps unquenchable) appetite for “the color,” or the gold that makes him wealthy enough to control Deadwood’s municipal, economic, and political affairs. Hearst, in a further display of his influence, simply buys enough votes from residents of the Black Hills (including Deadwood) to ensure that people sympathetic to his interests gain positions of power.

Hearst’s interference upsets the tenuous civic equilibrium that the camp achieves during Deadwood’s second season. Bullock, thanks to Hearst’s rigging, loses the election as sheriff to Harry Manning (Brent Sexton)—a bartender at Tom Nuttall’s saloon who wishes to found the camp’s first fire department—in the series finale, “Tell Him Something Pretty” (3.12). The camp’s nascent democracy, therefore, begins as a corrupt enterprise that circumvents the will of the people, Swearengen’s pragmatism, and Merrick’s romanticism by preferring greed over community.

The final episode, moreover, illustrates how Hearst’s power is comprehensive when he purchases the services of Pinkerton Detective Agency workers to menace the local population by forming a private militia that enforces Hearst’s will on the camp’s populace. Two agents murder Whitney Ellsworth in the series’s penultimate episode, “The Catbird Seat,” which prompts a distraught Trixie to shoot Hearst in the shoulder before this episode ends.65 Farnum’s comment about this event, with gallows humor marvelously delivered by William Sanderson, reflects the camp’s (and, likely, the viewer’s) perspective: “Hearst. Shot. The wound, alas, not mortal.”

Hearst, despite his injuries, completes his quest to dominate the camp’s affairs by purchasing Alma’s gold strike after a Pinkerton agent, in “A Constant Throb” (3.10), shoots at her while she walks to the camp’s bank. This threat convinces Alma to sell her claim because remaining in Deadwood and protecting Sofia Metz are more important to her than frustrating Hearst’s plans.

In “Tell Him Something Pretty,” Bullock, as sheriff, and Star, as chief officer of Deadwood’s bank, along with a Pinkerton agent named Newman, attend the meeting that sees Alma transfer her title to Hearst.66 The scene’s dialogue emphasizes Hearst’s need to manipulate the transaction’s every aspect, as well as Alma’s and Bullock’s refusal to capitulate to his petty demands:

HEARST: Mr. Newman, I ask you to ready payment to the officers of Mrs. Ellsworth’s bank.

BULLOCK: We’ll receive it where we can put it in her safe.

HEARST: May I hope, Madam, you do not subscribe to this insulting and juvenile precaution?

ALMA: I do not find the precaution juvenile, so many having been murdered with whom you’ve had dealings in this camp.

HEARST: At least you acknowledge the insult.

ALMA: I acknowledge the pretense to civility in a man so brutally vicious as vapid and grotesque. (Alma rises, followed by Hearst.)

HEARST: Have the gold seen to her bank, Newman. Have its purity assayed. Let her or her seconds choose the man. When that tedium is completed, have the documents witnessed as though we were all of us Jews and bring the business back to me. Excuse my absence, Mr. Star, as I hope you’ll forgive my thoughtless aspersion on your race. You stand for local office, but some contests being countywide, I await wires from the other camps. (Hearst goes to the door. Alma passes him.) You’ve changed your scent.

BULLOCK (to Star): Can’t shut up. Every bully I ever met can’t shut his fuckin’ mouth. Except when he’s afraid.

HEARST: You mistake for fear, Mr. Bullock, what is, in fact, preoccupation. I’m havin’ a conversation you cannot hear.

Hearst’s final line refers to his Indian name, Boy-the-Earth-Talks-To, a designation that explains his uncanny talent (for discovering gold, silver, and other precious metals) as the ability to hear (and to translate) the earth’s voice. Alma, however, highlights Hearst’s venality, while Bullock accurately describes the man as a bully whose menacing demeanor covers insecurity, anxiety, and apprehension.

As such, Hearst gets what he wants materially, but not morally, when Alma castigates his stunted character. Alma and Bullock rebuke Hearst’s irritation by insisting on following sensible procedures to secure her payment, thereby resisting Hearst’s control of the deal’s linguistic and emotional elements. Hearst’s perfume comment, in this context, becomes the scene’s most juvenile moment, proving that the mining mogul’s wealth doesn’t ensure wisdom, decency, or integrity.

A more potent example involves Hearst’s demand that his assailant be killed in “Tell Him Something Pretty,” forcing Swearengen to murder Jen (Jennifer Lutheran)—the Gem prostitute whom Johnny Burns fancies—in Trixie’s place when Burns proves unable to do so (Swearengen stabs Jen in his office, off-camera). Hearst accepts Jen’s corpse as Trixie’s, not realizing (or not caring about) the ruse that Swearengen perpetrates, then leaves town to see to business and political interests in other camps.

“Tell Him Something Pretty” and Deadwood end with Swearengen scrubbing Jen’s bloodstains from his office floor when Burns arrives to ask if she suffered. “I was gentle as I was able,” Swearengen says, “and that’s the last we’ll fucking speak of it, Johnny.” Burns departs, leaving Swearengen, still scrubbing the floor, to mutter, “Wants me to tell him something pretty” as the screen fades to black.

This scene is a fitting conclusion for Deadwood (despite Milch’s intention to produce one or two more seasons) because it so thoroughly muddies Swearengen’s ethical, personal, and political choices that the viewer cannot fully condemn or excuse his actions. Swearengen resolves earlier in the episode to kill Hearst should the ruse fail, but he ensures that Jen resembles Trixie by dressing her cadaver in Trixie’s clothes.

He murders Jen to protect the camp from Hearst’s wrath yet sacrifices an innocent woman to save Trixie’s life. He regrets this decision, personally cleaning the blood he has spilled, yet offers only a mild apology to Burns for killing the woman that Burns loves. Swearengen’s actions recapitulate the camp’s morally ambivalent responses to external power, authority, and money to offer a skillful metaphor for Deadwood’s appeal—Jason Jacobs’s “filthy joy”—as a Western that depicts a complicated, compromised, and corrupt nation whose entrepreneurial energy, political pragmatism, coarse strength, and material mastery reveal the frontier as far less romantic, admirable, and simplistic than Frederick Jackson Turner and Theodore Roosevelt believe it to be.

7. Race to the Bottom

Deadwood’s final scene also replays the gender and racial marginalization that the series interrogates. The camp’s political and physical survival depends on white men viewing the body of a woman murdered to satisfy a wealthy bigot’s vengeful masculinity. Hearst’s sexism has been evident since his arrival in camp, with his disregard for every woman except his absent wife, Phoebe, and his personal cook, “Aunt” Lou Marchbanks (Cleo King), enhanced by a courtliness that, Alma notes, departs when he’s challenged by any woman who opposes him.

Hearst’s racism is more complicated because his protestations about respecting and following the African-American Aunt Lou’s commands prove hollow when her son, Odell Marchbanks (Omar Gooding), arrives in Deadwood in “A Rich Find” (3.6) with news that a massive gold strike has been discovered in Liberia, the country founded by freed American slaves.

Odell has traveled from there to seek Hearst’s counsel, intending to dupe Hearst but approaching the matter subtly when sitting at dinner with the man in “Unauthorized Cinnamon” (3.7).67 Hearst insults Odell’s slovenly approach to fleecing him, causing Odell to threaten to leave after saying that he expected Hearst to send a man to Liberia to confirm the find’s legitimacy. Hearst relents, apologizing to Odell before lecturing him about gold’s power:

HEARST: Before the color, no white man—no man of any hue—moved to civilize or improve a place like this had reason to make the effort. The color brought commerce here and such order as has been attained.

ODELL: Yes, sir.

HEARST: Do you want to help Liberia, Odell?

ODELL: I want to help myself. (Hearst chuckles.) If Liberia’s where my chance is, that’s all right with me.

HEARST (offers a cigar to Odell): Gold is your chance, Odell.

ODELL (takes cigar): Thank you, sir.

HEARST: Gold is every man’s opportunity. Why do I make that argument? Because every defect in a man, and in others’ way of taking him, our agreement that gold has value gives us power to rise above.

ODELL: Fond as you are of my mother, without that gold I showed you, I don’t expect we’d be out here talking.

HEARST: That is correct. And for your effrontery at our meal a moment ago, I’d’ve seen you shot or hanged without a second thought. The value I gave the gold restrained me, you see, your utility in connection to it. And because of my gold, those at the other tables deferred to my restraint. Gold confers power. Power comes to any man who has the color.

ODELL: Even if he’s Black?

HEARST: That is our species’ hope: that uniformly agreeing on its value, we organize to seek the color.

Hearst expresses more racial tolerance than he feels by giving the word color different connotations than Deadwood’s viewers (or Odell, in an earlier scene) expect. Rather than referring to “colored people,” Hearst uses the term to connote gold, as well as gold’s symbolic and material power because, for Hearst, gold creates commerce, civilization, and the hope of racial solidarity.

Hearst, however, can’t hide his contempt for Odell sitting at his table or rising from it in anger. Mentioning Odell’s effrontery becomes a metaphorical reference to the anger felt by Southern white Americans at the freeing of enslaved people at the Civil War’s conclusion. Hearst’s entire speech, occurring in 1877 or 1878 (at the end of the period known as Reconstruction), laments the lost civilization that he suggests America has become. Hearst, we see, retains his core belief that Odell, a Black man, isn’t good enough to sit at his table (only Odell’s connection to gold makes him worthy). Hearst, the careful viewer notes, never allows Aunt Lou to dine with him, either. She, indeed, is little more to Hearst than his “nigger maid,”68 whom Hearst quietly complains about, berates, and intimidates on more than one occasion.

Hearst, according to Milch, “was a Southern sympathizer and maintained a form of genial, condescending racism”69 that Gerald McRaney’s performance of Hearst’s gold speech expertly captures. Hearst’s gentility, however, can’t lessen the hatred that lies behind his words or his anger at being challenged by Odell. Aunt Lou, who has begged Odell to leave Hearst alone, worries for her son’s safety, a well-founded concern when the viewer considers Odell’s later, suspicious death while returning to New York City.

Hearst, in “Amateur Night” (3.9), tells Aunt Lou that Odell was robbed and killed near Rapid City, but Hearst’s menacing behavior in the previous episode, “Leviathan Smiles” (3.8), reveals both his racism and his rage.70 Aunt Lou asks Hearst to send a rider to deliver a garnet brooch that Odell accidentally leaves behind:

HEARST: My imagination resists the approach in that however quickly he might catch Odell, until he did, the man would know he rode in the service of a colored person. I’d suggest, having packed the brooch carefully and securely, we ship it to New York, where my man Fitzpatrick can give it to your son when he arrives.

AUNT LOU: All right.

HEARST: Are you afraid that by his not receiving today the token of your love something untoward might befall Odell? Are you superstitious that way, Aunt Lou?

Hearst’s concern that a white rider would object to serving a Black man expresses his own intolerance, while Hearst’s final two questions, delivered by McRaney with faint anger and subdued bitterness, imply that Odell is unprotected. Hearst seems genuinely pained when telling Aunt Lou about Odell’s death in “Amateur Night,” but she won’t let him hug her in support, fleeing from Hearst and confirming that she believes he ordered Odell’s murder.

Deadwood, therefore, doesn’t employ the documented racism of its setting merely to indulge racial epithets under the guise of historical accuracy, but rather illustrates how nonwhite characters face exclusion despite their intelligence and entrepreneurial spirit. Aunt Lou, for instance, is not the camp’s only African-American resident. Hostetler (Richard Gant), the owner of Deadwood’s livery, makes a reasonable living until one of his horses escapes while being castrated in “Amalgamation and Capital” (2.9), running wildly through the streets before trampling William Bullock, who later dies of his injuries.

Neither Seth nor Martha Bullock blames Hostetler for this tragedy, but Steve (Michael Harney), a white racist also injured by the horse, begins openly hating Hostetler during drunken ramblings at Tom Nuttall’s saloon. Hostetler leaves camp to capture the horse, accompanied by Samuel Fields (Franklin Ajaye), a Black man who calls himself “the Nigger General.” When Hostetler returns in “Full Faith and Credit” (3.4), he finds that, in his absence, Steve has taken over the livery, caring for its horses and incompetently running its business. Bullock, in “A Two-Headed Beast” (3.5), then mediates the sale of Hostetler’s livery to Steve, who balks at working for a Black man.

Steve, despite Bullock’s warnings, continues to provoke Hostetler, calling him a baboon and a liar until Hostetler, saying, “I will not be called a fucking liar. I didn’t live my life for that,”71 walks into the next room. A shot rings out, then Bullock discovers the suicidal Hostetler dead in a chair.

Milch’s approach to race and racism here is more mature than NYPD Blue’s sometimes reactionary stance. Hostetler endures Steve’s explicitly racist comments (the viewer imagines that Hostetler, born before the Civil War, has experienced vicious verbal attacks all his life) but can’t tolerate having his honesty, integrity, and reputation questioned. Hostetler equates these qualities with his full humanity, so his death shakes Bullock in its passionate rejection of Steve’s toxic racism.

Hostetler’s complex motivations for his suicide, however, illustrate Milch’s commitment to creating authentic human beings who react in unexpected, ambiguous, and complicated ways, to say nothing of Richard Gant’s superb acting. Deadwood is no mere cesspool of unrepentant racism, but a place where nonwhite residents strive to better their lives only to find that the restrictions of American society are, in the end, inescapable.

8. America & Assimilation

Deadwood, in a departure from conventional Westerns, dramatizes no extensive contact with Native Americans. Apart from Bullock’s fight to the death with an unnamed Lakota Indian at the beginning of “Plague” (a contest provoked by Bullock’s trespass onto a sacred Lakota burial site) and the delivery, in “Here Was a Man” (1.4), of a Native American’s severed head by a Mexican rider wishing to claim the bounty on Indian scalps that Swearengen offers in the pilot episode, no Native Americans are ever seen in the program’s 36 episodes.

Talk of encounters, battles, and treaties with Indians is frequent, with several characters (particularly Swearengen) referring to Native Americans by such epithets as “savages” and “dirt-worshipping heathens.” The pilot episode illustrates how Native Americans become all-purpose bogeymen for Deadwood’s residents when they are easily blamed for the Metz family massacre, while General Crook’s arrival in “Sold Under Sin” demonstrates the federal government’s determination not only to punish the Sioux for defeating Custer’s troops at the Battle of the Little Bighorn but also to take their land by whatever means necessary.

Swearengen keeps the Indian head, which he address as “Chief ” during occasional soliloquies in which he compares Deadwood’s unstable political position to the Native American history of land dispossession. These moments may strike the viewer as odd, but they express Swearengen’s sense that, despite his racism, he’s more connected to Native Americans than he initially admits.

Deadwood’s lengthiest examination of race, racism, and assimilation comes in the form of Mr. Wu. This character, marvelously played by Keone Young throughout the program’s three seasons, runs Chinatown (known colloquially by the racist moniker “Chink’s Alley”), the area of Deadwood where Chinese immigrants work as launderers, meat packers, drug runners, and prostitutes.

Wu refuses to learn English, but provides Swearengen with meat, opium, and information about the camp’s legitimate and criminal dealings. Wu’s English vocabulary, at least in the first season, consists of four words: Swedgin (Wu’s mangled version of Swearengen’s name), San Francisco, and, most prevalently, cocksucker (normally yelled as “cocksucka!”). The relationship between these two men is one of Deadwood’s most complicated and most enjoyable, for Swearengen’s frequently irritated and always racist treatment of Wu (Swearengen, as an example, forces Wu to enter the Gem Saloon through its back door) can’t obscure Swearengen’s affection and respect for Wu’s business acumen.

“In fact,” Paul Wright and Hailin Zhou write in “Divining the ‘Celestials’: The Chinese Subculture of Deadwood,” their shrewd assessment of Wu’s significance, “it is precisely Al and Wu’s intertwined interests and often-murderous exchange of professional courtesies that fuel many of the show’s central conflicts, as well as its brutal and blunt depiction of racial politics.”72 Wright and Zhou note that Deadwood offers an unvarnished portrayal of racism that’s important to the program’s narrative progression. Although nonwhite people remain minor characters in Deadwood, they exceed the stereotypes that their white counterparts assign them. Swearengen and Hearst are just as savage in their professional dealings as they accuse Wu of being, while Wu’s willingness to feed human corpses to his pigs is an apt metaphor for how the camp consumes its residents’ ambitions, hopes, and lives.

Wu, as such, clings to pragmatism as much as Swearengen, Hearst, Bullock, and Ellsworth. Wu is American, Milch writes in Stories of the Black Hills, because “he makes do with what’s in front of him. He takes things the way they are and doesn’t pretend they’re something else.”73 True as this statement may be, it underplays Wu’s—and, by extension, Deadwood’s—complicated relationship with Americanism. Wu adapts to, but does not fully accommodate, an American-as-European-descendant model of assimilation, but, instead, preserves those aspects of his native culture that allow him to serve as leader of the camp’s Chinese community while defying the racism that defines his life.

In the episode “Mister Wu” (1.10), for instance, Wu causes a minor uproar by entering the Gem’s front door to complain to Swearengen that two white men have robbed and killed his (Wu’s) opium courier, leading Swearengen to agree to kill one of these thieves in recompense.74 Swearengen refuses Wu’s demand that both robbers be murdered because killing two white men to avenge a single Chinese man’s death is unacceptable to Swearengen. Later in the episode, Cy Tolliver tells Swearengen, “I don’t deliver white men to chinks” when Swearengen consults him about which thief should be sacrificed.

Tolliver’s statement expresses Deadwood’s pervasive nativism. The program’s racial economy is stark but not simplistic. Characters like Tolliver and Steve may hold uncomplicated beliefs about white supremacy, but Bullock, Swearengen, and Calamity Jane (Robin Weigert) (who befriends Samuel Fields, loudly declaring that she’ll drink with anyone, no matter who he is, in “Complications” [2.5]) are more tolerant in their outlook even if they don’t crusade for civil rights.

Bullock’s treatment of Hostetler, Fields, Wu, and the camp’s unnamed Chinese residents, indeed, is eminently fair, while Steve’s visible racism toward Hostetler upsets the sheriff, as do all slights against Star’s Jewish background. Deadwood portrays a continuum of racial attitudes rather than blind, unthinking bigotry from all white characters, dramatizing Milch’s belief that it’s “a mistake to think that white people have a corner on prejudice or parochialism.”75 Deadwood’s many racial aspersions against nonwhite characters (particularly references to Native-American, African-American, and Chinese savagery), however, demonstrate that the camp’s white residents are responsible for more racial animus than any other single group.

The program also illustrates how racism becomes a commercial strategy. Francis Wolcott, on Hearst’s behalf, hires a polished, English-speaking Chinese man named Mr. Lee (Philip Moon) to become the camp’s primary opium runner and Chinese-prostitute dealer in the second season’s “Requiem for a Gleet.” Lee treats his women so abominably (they live in squalid quarters with no health checkups, eventually expiring from overwork) that both Doc Cochran and Wu confront Lee, but to no avail.76 The tension between Wu and Lee culminates in the second-season finale, “Boy-the-Earth-Talks-To,” when Swearengen assigns Dan Dority, Johnny Burns, and Silas Adams to dispatch Lee’s henchmen while Wu murders Lee.

They do so by hiding their identities behind Chinese masks and clothing provided by Wu, who celebrates his rival’s death by standing in the main thoroughfare and cutting off his queue, the distinctive hair braid that Wu wears as a sign of his Chinese identity. Looking up at Swearengen, Wu yells, “Wu! America!” to which Swearengen replies, “That’ll hold you tight to her tit.”

This scene’s staging, with Swearengen looking down on Wu as the latter man declares his allegiance to America, dramatizes the difficulties of assimilating into American culture: Nonwhite characters must voluntarily suppress their native identities (or elements of those identities that mark them as foreign to the white populace) if they wish to participate fully in America’s economy, government, and society. Wu’s enthusiasm contrasts Swearengen’s ironic recognition that Wu has sacrificed part of himself to join Deadwood’s community, a theme that continues in the third-season episode “True Colors” (3.3) when Wu arrives on a stagecoach from San Francisco wearing a fancy Western suit rather than the traditional Chinese clothing he’s previously displayed.

Wu, by transforming himself, becomes for Milch “the absolute pragmatist, and, simultaneously, the absolute outsider, which makes him of the essence of Deadwood.”77 Wu is one of Deadwood’s primary representatives of America’s complex, contested, and controversial emergence as an economic powerhouse, a status that depends on civilization, savagery, entrepreneurialism, thievery, hard work, dishonesty, order, chaos, racism, tolerance, law, and crime to organize the nation’s pursuit of its political interests. This paradoxical formulation of the American experience means that Deadwood refuses to tell its audience pretty lies about the nation’s glorious past.

Milch rewrites the traditional Western into a more intricate, challenging, and disturbing narrative than the genre’s fans may expect, but his series makes the point, articulated by Milch in Stories of the Black Hills, that “none of us want [sic] to realize that we live in Deadwood, but all of us do. That is the point of the exercise. After first recoiling in horror, we come to love the place where we live, in all of its contradictions. To love not just America, but the world of which America is simply the most recent form of organization.”78

Milch concludes Stories of the Black Hills with the hilarious statement, “I’d guess I’d paraphrase Jefferson, that with all its horrors, Deadwood is the last, best chance of all human cocksuckers.”79 This sentence’s profanity, both literal and metaphorical, invokes one of the nation’s Founding Fathers to emphasize the ambiguities that lie at the heart of American democracy.

Deadwood’s dramatic sophistication, therefore, discomfits its audience to create a fascinating, memorable, and depressing vision of America whose authenticity develops from the program’s unflinching acknowledgment that the nation’s genesis wasn’t easy, pure, or noble. This message resonates with 21st-Century viewers by matching their sense that America, no matter how inspiring its rhetoric, rarely lives up to its reputation.

Milch, by exposing the dark impulses central to the American dream, finds in the 19th Century what David Simon’s The Wire discovers in the 21st: hope, fear, promise, and peril in roughly equal measure. Deadwood, as a result, represents the summit of Milch’s career as a fiction writer, social realist, and television dramatist. It’s his undeniable masterpiece.

FILES

Vest, Jason_"American Savagery: David Milch's 'Deadwood'" (Chapter 5 of Violence Is Power) (2010)

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Read this post's original version, Chapter 5 of Jason Vest's 2010 book Violence Is Power.

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Deadwood 1.1_"Deadwood" Pilot Script (by David Milch) (20 August 2002)

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Read David Milch's Deadwood pilot script, titled "Deadwood" and dated 20 August 2002.

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Dexter, Pete_Deadwood (1986)

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Read Pete Dexter's National Book Award-winning Western novel, 1986's Deadwood.

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Diffrient, David Scott_"Deadwood Dick: The Western (Phallus) Reinvented" (2006) (Reading Deadwood)

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Read David Scott Diffrient's essay "Deadwood Dick: The Western (Phallus) Reinvented," his contribution to editor David Lavery's academic anthology Reading Deadwood: A Western to Swear By, published by I.B Tauris in 2006. Diffrient's essay runs from Pages 185-199.

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Edgerton, Gary R. & Jeffrey P. Jones (eds.)_Essential HBO Reader, The (2008)

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Read editors Gary R. Edgerton's & Jeffrey P. Jones's The Essential HBO Reader, published by the University Press of Kentucky in 2008. This volume, in addition to Edgerton's & Jones's introduction, includes 23 essays about premium-cable stalwart HBO's history & original series.

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Fiedler, Leslie A._Love and Death in the American Novel (1966 Revised Edition)

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Read Leslie A. Fiedler's classic 1960 study Love and Death in the American Novel. Stein and Day published a revised edition in 1966, and this fourth printing was published in 1973.

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Grey, Zane_Riders of the Purple Sage (1912)

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Read Zane Grey's classic Western novel, 1912's Riders of the Purple Sage.

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Hill, Erin_"'What's Afflictin' You': Corporeality, Body Crises and the Body Politic in Deadwood" (2006) (Reading Deadwood)

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Read Erin Hill's essay "'What's Afflictin' You': Corporeality, Body Crises, and the Body Politic in Deadwood," her contribution to editor David Lavery's academic anthology Reading Deadwood: A Western to Swear By, published by I.B Tauris in 2006. Hill's essay runs from Pages 171-183.

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Jacobs, Jason_"Al Swearengen: Philosopher King" (2006) (Reading Deadwood)

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Read Jason Jacobs's essay "Al Swearengen: Philosopher King," his contribution to editor David Lavery's academic anthology Reading Deadwood: A Western to Swear By, published by I.B Tauris in 2006. Jacobs's essay runs from Pages 11-21.

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L'Amour, Louis_Guns of the Timberlands (1955)

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Lavery, David (ed.): Reading Deadwood: A Western to Swear By (2006)

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Read David Lavery's academic anthology Reading Deadwood: A Western to Swear By, published by I.B. Tauris in 2006. This volume, in addition to Lavery's introduction, includes 14 essays that examine David Milch's HBO series Deadwood (2004-2006) from many different perspectives.

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McMurtry, Larry_Lonesome Dove (1985)

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Milch, David_Deadwood: Stories of the Black Hills (2006)

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Millichap, Joseph_"Robert Penn Warren, David Milch, and the Literary Contexts of Deadwood" (2006) (Reading Deadwood)

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Read Joseph Millichap's essay "Robert Penn Warren, David Milch, and the Literary Contexts of Deadwood," his contribution to editor David Lavery's academic anthology Reading Deadwood: A Western to Swear By, published by I.B Tauris in 2006. Millichap's essay runs from Pages 101-113.

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Motion Picture (Hays) Production Code of 1930 (from Thomas Doherty's Pre-Code Hollywood)

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Read the most complete version of the Motion Picture Production Code of 1930 (known colloquially as the Hays Code), as reprinted in Thomas Doherty's 1999 book Pre-Code Hollywood.

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Newcomb, Horace_"Deadwood" (2008) (Essential HBO Reader)

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Read Horace Newcomb's essay "Deadwood," his contribution to editors Gary R. Edgerton's & Jeffrey P. Jones's academic anthology The Essential HBO Reader, published by the University Press of Kentucky in 2008. Newcomb's essay runs from Pages 92-102.

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O'Sullivan, Sean_"Old, New, Borrowed, Blue: Deadwood and Serial Fiction" (2006) (Reading Deadwood)

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Read Sean O'Sullivan's essay "Old, New, Borrowed, Blue: Deadwood and Serial Fiction," his contribution to editor David Lavery's academic anthology Reading Deadwood: A Western to Swear By, published by I.B Tauris in 2006. O'Sullivan's essay runs from Pages 115-129.

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Roosevelt, Theodore_Winning of the American West, The (All 4 Volumes) (2017)

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Read all four volumes of Theodore Roosevelt's The Winning of the American West, published by Madison & Adams Press in 2017. These four volumes were originally published under the title The Winning of the West by G.P. Putnam's Sons from 1889 to 1896.

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Siegel, Lee_Not Remotely Controlled: Notes on Television (2007)

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Read Lee Siegel's 2007 book Not Remotely Controlled: Notes on Television, published by Basic Books. Siegel's review of Deadwood appears on Pages 131-136.

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Simon, David_Introduction to Rafael Alvarez's The Wire: Truth Be Told (2004)

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Read David Simon's long introduction to the first edition of Rafael Alvarez's production history The Wire: Truth Be Told, published by Pocket Books in 2004. Simon's essay appears on Pages 2-34. This file also includes the book's Season 1 Overview & Glossary.

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Sterne, Richard Clark_"N.Y.P.D. Blue" (1998) (Prime Time Law)

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Read Richard Clark Sterne's essay "N.Y.P.D. Blue," his contribution to editors Robert M. Jarvis's & Paul R. Joseph's academic anthology Prime Time Law, published by California Academic Press in 1998. Sterne's essay runs from Pages 87-104.

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Turner, Frederick Jackson_Frontier in American History, The (1920)

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Read Frederick Jackson Turner's The Frontier in American History, a collection of his historical essays first published by Henry Holt in 1920. Turner's landmark 1893 essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" appears on Pages 1-38.

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Wire, The: Truth Be Told (by Rafael Alvarez) (2010)

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Read Rafael Alvarez's complete production history The Wire: Truth Be Told. This revised edition, published by Canongate in 2010, covers all 5 seasons & 60 episodes of David Simon's HBO series The Wire.

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Wister, Owen_The Virginian (1902)

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Wright & Zhou_"Divining the 'Celestials': The Chinese Subculture of Deadwood" (2006) (Reading Deadwood)

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Read Paul Wright's & Hailin Zhou's essay "Divining the 'Celestials': The Chinese Subculture of Deadwood," their contribution to editor David Lavery's academic anthology Reading Deadwood: A Western to Swear By, published by I.B Tauris in 2006. Wright's & Zhou's essay runs from Pages 157-168.

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NOTES

Note to The Vestibule’s subscribers: Richard Belzer’s death on 19 February 2023 is a tremendous loss and, coming so soon after Annie Wersching’s passing on 29 January 2023, delivers a one-two punch to lovers of great acting. Rather than lament the universe’s unfairness in taking another terrific talent from us, I instead offer my condolences to Belzer’s family, friends, and colleagues.

Belzer’s remarkable performance as Detective (later Sergeant) John Munch over 23 years—as a principal cast member in all seven seasons of Paul Attanasio’s Homicide: Life on the Street (1993-1999) and in the first 15 seasons of Dick Wolf’s Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (1999-Present), with a guest appearance in SVU’s Season 17—makes Belzer a record-setter. As I write these words, he occupies the Number 2 spot on the list of American primetime-television performers who’ve played the same character over the longest continuous span of time, outlasted only by his fellow SVU castmate Mariska Hargitay, who’s played Detective (now Captain) Olivia Benson for 24 seasons (and counting).

Belzer will drop to Number 3 on this list if his fellow SVU actor Ice-T returns as Detective (now Sergeant) Odafin Tutuola in this program’s 25th season. NBC, I hasten to add, has yet to renew SVU, already the longest-running primetime drama in the history of American television, for its 25th season, although betting against this prospect seems like a fool’s errand given this second Law & Order series’s popularity.

Plus, Belzer lays claim to another American-television record, having appeared as Munch on five other one-hour drama series (Chris Carter’s The X-Files, Tom Fontana’s The Beat, David Simon’s The Wire, and Dick Wolf’s Law & Order and Law & Order: Trial by Jury), two half-hour comedy series (Tina Fey’s 30 Rock and Mitchell Hurwitz’s Arrested Development), one half-hour animated series (Seth MacFarlane’s, Mike Barker’s, and Matt Weitzman’s American Dad!), and a late-night talk show (namely, a comedy sketch performed on the 7 October 2009 episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live!).

Belzer, in simpler language, appeared as the same character on 11 different American television programs, a record that may never be broken. His prolificacy in this role is perhaps the most notable aspect of a career that stretched over five decades, beginning in 1972 and ending when Belzer left public life after departing SVU for good in 2016. Working as a stand-up comedian, a part-time conspiracy theorist, and the author (or co-author) of six books (including the cheekily titled 2008 novel I Am Not a Cop!), Belzer was indefatigable throughout 44 years of excellent work, slowing down only after retiring to his home in Beaulieu-sur-Mer, France in 2016.

If, as reported by novelist, comedy writer, and close friend Bill Scheft, Belzer’s last words were indeed “Fuck you, motherfucker,” then he (Belzer) was just as profanely witty at the end of his life as he was for most of his 78 years on this planet.

Belzer’s death provides a tragic counterpoint to the 30th anniversary of Homicide: Life on the Street’s 31 January 1993 premiere. This episode, broadcast immediately after the conclusion of Super Bowl XXVII, inaugurated a television series that remains, three decades later, a remarkable achievement for its entire cast and crew.

Indeed, this program is so good that I commemorate its status as an American cultural classic by reprinting “Red Balls: David Simon and Homicide: Life on the Street,” the third chapter of my 2010 scholarly monograph Violence Is Power, below. Bearing a new title and following The Vestibule’s house style, this l-oo-nnn-gggg piece analyzes how Homicide adapts David Simon’s 1991 book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets as well as any television program has ever transferred a work of non-fiction into a continuing, weekly drama series.

Violence Is Power compares the lives, careers, and television writing of David Simon (the creator of The Corner, The Wire, and Tremé, among others) and David Milch (the writer-producer who co-created—with the late-great Steven Bochco—1993-2005’s NYPD Blue and who created 2004-2006’s Deadwood) to argue that both men’s excursions into television drama have produced some of the most fascinating programs of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries, in the process becoming significant social realists whose efforts rank among the best popular art produced in the United States of America during their lifetimes.

So, for what I hope is every reader’s enjoyment, I now present “Red Balls and Blue Bloods.” The original chapter (including Violence Is Power’s complete bibliography and filmography), plus six other sources pertaining to Homicide: Life on the Street, are all available in the “Files” section that appears after this piece’s conclusion.

Despite disclaiming Violence Is Power’s title (I lost three “discussions” with my publisher’s marketing team after submitting a manuscript named American Savagery, which, as I argued during these “chats,” is the title of a book worth stealing from the library or the bookstore—remember bookstores, dear reader?), this volume still holds a special place in my heart because it’s one that I hope my late father would’ve approved. Although I’m unsure how much he’d have enjoyed reading any academic treatise, even one written by his son, he was a great lover of American television and, especially, American cop-and-detective shows. As such, Dad might well have disagreed with my evaluations of Simon’s and Milch’s work, but I would’ve loved debating those judgments (and watching those shows) with him.

And I would’ve enjoyed discussing these issues with Richard Belzer, had I ever been lucky enough to meet him in person, but, now that Belzer has joined the ancestors, I shall only say that he’ll be fondly remembered and greatly missed.

May he rest in perfect peace.

Homicide: Life on the Street

• Created by Paul Attanasio

• Based on Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets by David Simon

• Starring Daniel Baldwin, Ned Beatty, Richard Belzer, Andre Brauger, Reed Diamond, Giancarlo Esposito, Michelle Forbes, Peter Gerety, Isabella Hofmann, Želko Ivanek, Clark Johnson, Yaphet Kotto, Melissa Leo, Toni Lewis, Michael Michele, Max Perlich, Jon Polito, Kyle Secor, Jon Seda, and Callie Thorne

• Guest Starring Ami Brabson, Erik Todd Dellums, Gerald F. Gough, Wendy Hughes, Clayton LeBouef, Harlee McBride, Ellen McElduff, Walt McPherson, Austin Pendleton, Kristin Rohde, Ralph Tabakin, Judy Thornton, Sean Whitesell, and Sharon Ziman

• 122 one-hour episodes & 1 two-hour telefilm

• Original broadcast 31 January 1993 — 21 May 1999 & 13 February 2000 (telefilm)

1. From Page to Screen

Homicide: Life on the Street (1993–1999) not only adapted David Simon’s 1991 book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets into a critically acclaimed television series but also inaugurated Simon’s television-writing career. Although each episode credits Paul Attanasio as this program’s creator, executive producers Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana developed Homicide: Life on the Street (hereafter known simply as Homicide) from Simon’s book once movie director Levinson optioned the rights to Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (hereafter referred to as A Year on the Killing Streets) soon after its 1991 publication.

Levinson—best known for directing the feature films Diner (1982), The Natural (1984), Good Morning, Vietnam (1987), and Rain Man (1988)—came to believe that the book’s rich details about the fractious professional lives of Baltimore homicide detectives deserved the narrative attention that only an ongoing series—with its multiple episodes, continuing storylines, and complex characters—could offer. Confining Simon’s 650-page book (originally pitched to Levinson as a movie) to a film’s two-hour running time would have, in Levinson’s mind, eviscerated A Year on the Killing Streets’s factual complexity, narrative density, and sociological precision.1

Levinson quickly hired Fontana, the veteran writer-producer of St. Elsewhere (1982–1988), to adapt Simon’s mammoth book into a workable dramatic program, to supervise Homicide’s writing staff, and to ensure that the series avoided cop-drama clichés. Levinson also offered Attanasio, the screenwriter who had adapted Michael Crichton’s 1993 novel Disclosure into Levinson’s 1994 film of the same title, the opportunity to write Homicide’s pilot episode after Attanasio finished the screenplay for Robert Redford’s 1994 film Quiz Show.2

Attanasio, however, didn’t function as a producer, staff writer, or consultant for the series, penning only one additional Homicide episode, “See No Evil” (2.1), during the program’s seven-season run. Critical observers, in light of these facts, more properly consider Levinson and Fontana to be Homicide’s originators. Fontana’s input became so crucial to Homicide’s success that writers-producers James Yoshimura and Eric Overmyer, in their DVD commentary for “The Documentary” (5.11), explicitly credit Fontana as the program’s creator.3

This tangled genesis, however familiar to American television, didn’t initially include Simon, who worked as a crime (or police-beat) reporter for the Baltimore Sun newspaper from 1982 until 1995. During his tenure at the Sun, Simon took two year-long leaves of absence to research and write his massively detailed accounts of urban Baltimore: 1991’s Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets and 1997’s The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood. This final book was cowritten with ex-Baltimore Police Department detective Edward Burns, who would become Simon’s writing and producing partner for HBO’s 2008 miniseries adaptation of Evan Wright’s Generation Kill and, most crucially, for their HBO masterpiece The Wire (2002-2008).

Simon sold the rights to A Year on the Killing Streets but didn’t involve himself in creating, running, or supervising the program’s early seasons, even though he and David Mills co-wrote the teleplay (based on a story by Fontana) for Homicide’s second-season opener, the excellent “Bop Gun” (2.4).

This episode was broadcast by NBC, Homicide’s parent network, as the premiere of its abbreviated, four-episode second season to capitalize on guest star Robin Williams’s presence. Thanks to Levinson’s work as a well-regarded film director, he was able, in a pattern that recurred throughout Homicide’s network life, to entice big-screen actors like Williams—whom Levinson had directed to a breakout performance in Good Morning, Vietnam—and fellow movie directors like Kathryn Bigelow, Martin Campbell, Gary Fleder, and Barbara Kopple to work for the program.

Simon’s minimal involvement, however, belies his importance to Homicide’s televisual incarnation. Fontana, for one, sees A Year on the Killing Streets as decisively influential to Homicide’s success while discussing the series’s origins with Levinson during their audio commentary for its first episode, “Gone for Goode” (1.1). “I think by the end of the six years [of the program’s production] we had pretty much sucked every comma and question mark out of [David Simon’s] book,” Fontana at one point says, making an observation that no attentive viewer can deny.4

So many characters, plotlines, and criminal cases from A Year on the Killing Streets make their way into Homicide that Fontana’s cheerful hyperbole underscores how much the process of bringing Homicide to television differed from David Milch’s process in co-creating NYPD Blue (1993-2005) with Steven Bochco. Adapting Simon’s book required a fidelity to its journalistic source that Milch attempted, but could not approximate, by basing so much of NYPD Blue’s early narrative material on New York City Police Department officer Bill Clark’s detective career. This judgment doesn’t diminish Milch’s research in preparing NYPD Blue’s portrayal of urban policing, but it emphasizes how faithfully Fontana and his writers attempted to preserve the integrity of Simon’s work in their series.

Homicide: Life on the Street, in another quirk of fate, premiered eight months before NYPD Blue, although Milch and Bochco began working on their program in late 1991 or early 1992 (at roughly the same time that Levinson and Fontana began working on their series).5 Homicide, however, never matched NYPD Blue’s ratings success, mainstream popularity, or press coverage. The usual explanation for this disparity—propounded by Simon, Levinson, Fontana, Yoshimura, Overmyer, other Homicide production personnel, fans, and critics (such as John Leonard)—is that Homicide eschews car chases, gunplay, nudity, and profanity to offer a more realistic, variegated, and accurate portrayal of detective work than NYPD Blue.

Homicide, in other words, challenges its viewers’ expectations of cop shows even more than does NYPD Blue (or another contemporary drama cited for its realistic approach to the criminal-justice system, Dick Wolf’s Law & Order) to attain a level of social realism not seen in other police dramas (even Bochco’s & Michael Kozoll’s landmark 1981-1987 series Hill Street Blues).

Homicide, to be certain, is one of the best cop shows ever broadcast on American television. Only Simon’s The Wire surpasses the breadth, depth, and intricacy of Homicide’s depiction of a major American city’s urban life, while Homicide’s portrait of the complicated lives of African-American characters was, in its day, unmatched in the history of American network television. The series nicely captures A Year on the Killing Streets’s complex tone—journalistic, analytical, reflective, cynical, sardonic, and unsentimental—even as it diverges from Simon’s book by allowing its fictional detectives to indulge more abstruse musings about life, crime, religion, and love than their real-life counterparts.

2. Spinning Stories & Breaking Clichés

David Simon, whose day-to-day involvement with Homicide began during its fourth season (Simon would receive screen credit as story editor beginning in the program’s fifth season and become a full-fledged producer for Season 6), potently analyzes Homicide’s literary aspirations by stating, in “Homicide: Life in Season 4,” the behind-the-scenes documentary included in the program’s Season 4 DVD set, that, when he began writing for Homicide,

I had to put aside in my mind the characters that I saw when I was in the Homicide Unit. There were very few characters that were reflective of the real detectives I knew, which is not to say they were not completely vibrant and worthy of the drama that was written about them. They were interesting to me because I’d watched them just, consumed them like any other viewer. But they had no real connection to me, in my head, to the book characters, who were very real and a lot less philosophical.6

This assessment both credits and criticizes Homicide’s dramatization of police lives by acknowledging the program’s vivid characters while underscoring its narrative departures from the street-level reality that A Year on the Killing Streets so painstakingly documents. Simon distinguishes real-life detectives’ disinterest in questions of morality, ethics, and justice from their fictional avatars’ concern with these issues. Simon advances a seemingly sophisticated appraisal of the different parameters of journalism and television drama by recognizing how the show’s characters philosophize about their work and their lives more explicitly than the actual detectives whose experiences Simon’s book chronicles.

This perspective, however, ignores the expert pacing, nuanced characters, and precise details that A Year on the Killing Streets includes. The book masterfully integrates these techniques into its sociological evaluation of the problems besetting late 20th-Century Baltimore to erode the boundaries between neutral reportage and literary license that Simon insists set his book apart from its television counterpart. A Year on the Killing Streets, indeed, includes continuous third-person commentary that analyzes the nature of police work alongside the economic disillusionment, political lethargy, racial animus, and cultural dislocations that define Baltimore’s civic life during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Tom Fontana and Homicide’s writers, since their program rarely employs voiceover narration to advance an episode’s plot, allow their characters to verbalize ideas, concepts, and opinions that A Year on the Killing Streets presents as the work of a single, unnamed, third-person narrator (who seemingly reflects Simon’s attitudes, opinions, and perspectives).

Simon, in the same behind-the-scenes interview, elaborates how Homicide’s detectives diverge from the men and women whom he observed during his year-long sojourn with the Baltimore Police Department’s Homicide Unit:

There was not a lot of great debate about religion or good or evil. The nature of good and evil was determined based on “I have enough to charge or I don’t have enough to charge” or “he’s an asshole or he’s not an asshole.” That struck me as the difference in the show, between the show and the book is that, uh, the show really was, like, trying to tackle some great moral questions through the use of character, and real life often isn’t like that.7

This assessment invokes an implicit dichotomy between A Year on the Killing Streets’s putative realism and Homicide’s moral drama. Ethical concerns arising from murder cases, in Simon’s telling, do not plague actual detectives. Real-life homicide cops—or “murder police,” in Baltimore parlance—focus on a case’s essential details rather than becoming emotionally, spiritually, or intellectually invested in a heinous act whose motives, Simon implies, they try not to ponder.

Such philosophizing amounts to reckless folly for people whose task is closing murder cases, not comforting the family members of homicide victims, even if determining who committed the crime, arresting the perpetrator(s), and relinquishing the suspect(s) to the criminal-court system helps these family members manage their grief. The emotionally draining experience of probing murder, in other words, requires homicide detectives to reduce their field of vision to a case’s details. This reaction is a psychological defense against the sadness, anxiety, and depression that contemplating the tragedy of murder might induce.

Indeed, homicide detectives’ impulse to judge their job performance by tracking which cases result in arrests rather than indictments or convictions typifies A Year on the Killing Streets’s depiction of late 20th-Century urban American policing as a bureaucratic morass that sporadically, if ever, seeks justice as its goal. Two notable passages speak to the heartless statistical ballet that Baltimore’s homicide detectives must dance to please their superior officers.

The first excerpt alternates sacred diction with profane imagery to make this point: “It is the unrepentant worship of statistics that forms the true orthodoxy of any modern police department. Captains become majors who become colonels who become deputies when the numbers stay sweet; the command staff backs up on itself like a bad stretch of sewer pipe when they don’t.”8 Homicide detectives may refuse to debate the merits of individual murders, but Simon’s account stresses how pursuing higher clearance rates subordinates all talk of good and evil to the utilitarian demands of bureaucratic authority, which co-opts religious language to demand that police officers venerate a new master: cold, hard numbers that permit no sentiment other than success (as defined by the higher-ups who control that same bureaucracy).

The second passage remorselessly punctures the hope—sustained, if not created, by the hundreds of television cop shows broadcast by American radio and television networks since the 1940s—that homicide detectives wish to do right by murder victims: “Consider the fact that a case is regarded to be cleared whether it arrives at the grand jury or not. As long as someone is locked up—whether for a week or a month or a lifetime—that murder is down.”9

This single sentence demolishes the image of virtuous detectives crusading for justice, while the following lines underscore the officious mentality that creates this heartless system: “If the charges are dropped at the arraignment for lack of evidence, if the grand jury refuses to indict, if the prosecutor decides to dismiss the case or place it on the inactive, or stet, docket, that murder is nonetheless carried on the books as a solved crime. Detectives have a tag line for such paper clearances: Stet ’em and forget ’em.”10 Closing homicide cases is, A Year on the Killing Streets repeatedly argues, less a matter of righteous indignation than a procedurally driven, paperwork-laden, and administratively burdensome occupation that, like so many careers in postindustrial America, diminishes authentic human feeling to the point that all decisions seem soulless.

This jaded vision characterizes Simon’s nonfiction work, television writing, and political outlook. Homicide effectively captures this perspective, particularly in the single-minded determination of its most original and bracing character, Detective Frank Pembleton (Andre Braugher), to close cases regardless of the victim’s identity, the perpetrator’s motivations, and the police hierarchy’s interference. Pembleton’s partner, Detective Tim Bayliss (Kyle Secor), does not share Pembleton’s cold-blooded fascination with the facts of murder but instead becomes emotionally involved in cases—particularly the killings of young children—that prompt him to wonder about “the why,” meaning the reason(s) that one human being murders another.11

Homicide’s inaugural episode, along with much of its first season, follows Bayliss’s initiation into the seemingly uncaring world of homicide detectives, who jettison empathy to prevent the emotional damage that afflicts several principal characters—including Bayliss, Detective Steve Crosetti (Jon Polito), Detective Beau Felton (Daniel Baldwin), and Detective Mike Kellerman (Reed Diamond)—throughout the program’s seven seasons. Felton’s deteriorating marriage is one of Season 3’s major plotlines, while Crosetti commits suicide in “Crosetti” (3.4). Kellerman nearly shoots himself in the head in “Have a Conscience” (5.13), avoiding this fate only because his partner, Detective Meldrick Lewis (Clark Johnson), talks him out of it.

Bayliss never goes this far, but the death of Adena Watson, a young African-American girl whose murder is Bayliss’s first case as primary investigator, haunts him for Homicide’s entire broadcast run. Bayliss, in Homicide’s strongest rebuke to the cop-drama convention of closing major cases by the end of an episode, a season, or the series itself, never solves Watson’s murder.

These narrative developments parallel A Year on the Killing Streets better than Simon recognizes, while Barry Levinson’s and Tom Fontana’s commitment to civil liberties ensures that Homicide offers a more progressive portrayal of urban policing than NYPD Blue. Only the early seasons of Hill Street Blues match Homicide’s realistic depiction of urban life, although Hill Street, by setting its police station in a harsh (even animalistic) ghetto neighborhood, indulges stereotypes about the diminished, damaged, and violent lives of its district’s mostly poor, mostly non-white residents.

Homicide, thanks to Fontana’s insistence on avoiding cop-drama formulas, breaks these conventions more frequently than it obeys them, mixing elements of the traditional police procedural, the observant social comedy, and the classic drama (which Richard Clark Sterne, in his essay about NYPD Blue in Robert M. Jarvis’s & Paul R. Joseph’s invaluable academic anthology Prime Time Law: Fictional Television as Legal Narrative, believes commercial television feebly reproduces12) into a unique series whose terrific writing, documentary camera work, and superlative acting enhance its social realism.

3. Keeping It Real(?)

This final statement should not imply that Homicide is, in fact, an objective or neutral account of homicide detection. By sympathizing with its cop characters, even while presenting them unsentimentally, Homicide fails to dramatize the lives of criminals, suspects, and residents with the same careful attention that it accords police officers (only Simon’s The Wire achieves this goal).

The series, however, offers a more vibrant portrait of its urban community than any previous (or contemporary) network police drama, permitting Homicide to stand apart from the generic tradition in which it participates. Tom Fontana acknowledges this complicated lineage during an interview with James L. Longworth, Jr. in TV Creators: Conversations with America’s Top Producers of Television Drama by revealing that Levinson originally approached St. Elsewhere producers John Tinker and John Masius to adapt A Year on the Killing Streets into a television series.

When they departed the project, Tinker and Masius urged Levinson to contact Fontana. “I went out and met with Barry,” Fontana tells Longworth, “and when the whole idea of a cop show was presented to me, I was like, ‘Well, there’s never going to be a better cop show than Hill Street Blues, there’s no other way to do it better.’”13 This assessment, however, didn’t deter Levinson from outlining a different vision for his new television program: “‘I want to do a cop show without car chases and without gun battles. I want to do Homicide as a thinking man’s unit.’ And so, the minute [Levinson] said that, I [Fontana] said, ‘That’s impossible. I have to be part of this!’”14

Fontana’s enthusiasm led to him to hire writers, particularly Chicago-born playwright James Yoshimura, who would upset the accepted conventions of television crime drama, resist network pressure to make Homicide a more predictable program, and honor the spirit of Simon’s book. Fontana’s general success in this venture allows Homicide to fulfill Levinson’s aspiration for the series to become a thinking person’s police show even while indulging elements of traditional cop dramas, whether infrequent shootouts, car chases (that sometimes end with detectives crashing their squad cars into other vehicles), and onscreen violence.

Placating NBC’s desire to improve the show’s ratings occasionally forced Homicide’s writers to honor the network’s demands for more romance, more violence, and more closed cases, but these compromises demonstrate that Homicide differs from typical cop shows by stressing authenticity in tone, mood, atmosphere, pace, and procedure. The series generally avoids rushing from scene to scene, while the long conversations and interrogations that typify Homicide’s structure allow its principal characters to achieve fully rounded lives of their own.

Fontana, however, refuses to demean Homicide’s major competitor, NYPD Blue, to improve his own program’s stature. He tells Longworth, “My opinion is that David Milch and Jimmy Yoshimura are probably the two most talented people writing television today, or, at least, episodic television” (this interview was conducted before Homicide’s 1999 cancellation, although Longworth’s book was not published until 2000).15 Fontana’s invocation of Hill Street Blues’s quality and Milch’s talent demonstrates his awareness of Homicide’s antecedents and contemporaries, but his respect for Yoshimura counters charges that Homicide cannot escape the shadow of its more popular rival. “My whole attitude toward Yosh is when he comes to me with an idea that he is excited about, I would be an idiot to stand in his way,”16 Fontana comments, implicitly declaring Homicide to be just as good as NYPD Blue.

Little rivalry exists in Fontana’s mind between his and Milch’s series due to Homicide’s singular style. Not every author can master it, making Homicide a challenging, but not impossible, program to write: “In my mind, not every writer can write everything. There are a lot of incredible writers who could not write an episode of Homicide, and that doesn’t mean they’re not good writers. That just means that they’re not right for this particular show.”17

This generosity of spirit explains how David Simon became such an intelligent television dramatist, for Fontana closely mentored Simon’s transition from journalist, book author, and social critic to small-screen writer. Simon, in the “Homicide: Life in Season 4” documentary, confesses that he declined producer Gail Mutrux’s offer to write the first episode because he knew nothing about television writing: “There was a moment where Gail called me up and said, ‘Would you like to try your hand at writing the pilot?’ and, uh, like an idiot, I said, ‘You know, no, get somebody who knows what they’re doing because I’ll mess it up and there’ll be no TV show.’”18

Simon eventually left the Baltimore Sun and came aboard Homicide’s writing staff, where Fontana instructed him in the challenges, pitfalls, and pleasures of producing television. Simon praises Fontana’s tutelage in “Inside Homicide: An Interview with David Simon and James Yoshimura” (a short documentary included in Homicide’s Complete Season 5 DVD set) by explaining Fontana’s approach to making television: “Tom made a promise to me, which was, uh, he said, ‘I don’t pay as much as some producers and I don’t give titles easily—I won’t make you a producer until you’re really producing—but I’ll teach you how to do this, I’ll teach you everything I can possibly teach you about not just writing for television, but protecting the writing,’ which is what producing is in a sense.”19 Simon recognizes that Fontana’s concern for preserving the integrity of every writer’s story distinguishes television from cinema: “The writer has no authority to protect his story, his telling of the story, in features. It’s, it’s a director-and star-based medium, but in television, the writer rules.”20

Simon would take this final dictum to heart when creating, producing, and writing The Corner and The Wire, but, despite Simon’s status as the author of A Year on the Killing Streets, his first television job required him to work as one member of Homicide’s busy writing staff under Fontana’s supervision. This arrangement benefited Simon by allowing him to learn the rigors of producing a weekly series, to recognize the limitations that major American networks impose upon their primetime dramas, to negotiate the resulting narrative constrictions, and to appreciate the unique possibilities that fiction affords socially conscious authors when constructing incisive, relevant, and realistic stories about crime, race, class, and politics.

“Homicide: Life in Season 4” reveals that Fontana dubbed Simon “Nonfiction Boy” because Simon initially approached writing Homicide with a journalist’s eye for accuracy. His talent for lucid detail explains how A Year on the Killing Streets’s exacting portrait of urban police work enriched Homicide’s early seasons by providing Fontana and his writers with exhaustive material that they could fashion into inventive, unconventional, and quirky crime drama.

Simon, once he joined the writing staff, “was always the guy at the meeting that went, ‘Well, it really wouldn’t work that way,’”21 but this perspective misunderstands the power of television drama. Homicide, by emphasizing, altering, and enhancing Simon’s account of real-life murder police, sketches a more viscerally intimate portrait of fictional events than A Year on the Killing Streets does with its journalistic (and supposedly detached) tone. Homicide’s signature visual style of handheld footage, jump cuts, and quick montage may approximate the vérité storytelling of documentary films, while A Year on the Killing Streets’s fulsome details may create a comprehensively realized world, but Homicide’s lively characters, compelling stories, and handsome production values ensure that its audience relates to its imaginary portrait of Baltimore more immediately, more incisively, and more intensely than to the book’s factual accounts of urban crime.

Fontana, because he understood these differences, ably honed Simon’s dramatic instincts while taking advantage of Simon’s vast knowledge of police culture to meld fact with fiction, to generate Homicide’s distinctive style, and to teach Simon how powerful a medium television can be. Simon, in the “Inside Homicide” documentary, lauds Fontana’s willingness to consider his (Simon’s) desire for accuracy: “Tom, to his credit, he would listen and . . . sometimes he would say, ‘Okay, well, let’s do it the way it really would be’ and, other times, he would say, ‘No, this is better storytelling. You know, let’s do the make-believe here because this makes a better episode.’ And the purposes were different, you know. It wasn’t journalism. It was episodic drama.”22

This formulation’s invocation of “make believe” concedes that television drama’s fictional imperatives—rather than always promulgating tired, hackneyed, and formulaic stories—can, at their best, submerge viewers into an invented environment that offers stunning appraisals of everyday life. Homicide, in other words, may not be journalism, but its documentary tone permits Fontana, Simon, and the program’s other writers to fashion a cop show that is also an absorbing and compelling, yet sometimes imperfect, work of social realism.

4. Cop Shops & Stops

The dichotomy between journalistic accuracy and televisual imagination suggested by David Simon’s comments is, in at least one significant respect, false. Simon implies that his book’s account of one year (1988) in the life of the Baltimore Homicide Unit reports the events he observed more clinically than Homicide’s fictional narrative. Yet, as Christopher P. Wilson notes in “True and True(r) Crime: Cop Shops and Crime Scenes in the 1980s,” his masterful analysis of three popular true-crime books published in the early 1990s (Simon’s A Year on the Killing Streets, Mitch Gelman’s 1992 Crime Scene: On the Streets with a Rookie Police Reporter, and Robert Blau’s 1993 The Cop Shop: True Crime on the Streets of Chicago), this presumption elides the social, political, economic, and ideological biases that influence how A Year on the Killing Streets represents late 20th-Century urban policing.

Simon’s book may construct a dispassionate, even neutral, façade, but this impression cannot long withstand critical analysis. Wilson identifies A Year on the Killing Streets as an exemplary “‘liberal-realist’ initiation narrative,” or a story of “baptism into an urban, street-smart wisdom” that, despite its liberal credentials, participates in the “‘authoritarian populism’ or ‘popular conservatism’ emergent in the 1980s.”23 Simon’s cop-shop narrative, like Gelman’s and Blau’s books, proclaims its neutrality while replaying a “dramatic 1980s clash of posts and dispositions: the encounter of young liberal reporters, in the twilight years of Reagan-Bush America, with the supposed pathology of our inner cities.”24

Wilson perceptively argues that true-crime (or cop-shop) books such as A Year on the Killing Streets advance a specific view of American crime, namely, a hard-boiled perspective that “might well be described as working in the field of urban ‘police populism.’”25 These books represent police power as necessary to preserving social order; claim sympathy for impoverished citizens who live in crime-infested areas, but rarely deal with the institutional, structural, and social reasons that poverty and crime exist; and see criminals as social deviants who fail to follow civilized rules, not as complex human beings trapped in an unjust system.

They offer “a terribly unrepresentative look at American violence” because, as a “murder-based genre,” the true-crime narrative “overemphasizes female victims, older victims, and—intriguingly—white offenders and white victims” while reproducing Vance Thompson’s compelling insight that “the police reporter’s daily lesson is ‘the fall of man.’”26 The true-crime book’s tendency to regard police work as a notable (even noble) effort to preserve order, in other words, compromises true crime’s much-celebrated courage in facing urban America’s bitter realities. Critical readers, therefore, should notice how A Year on the Killing Streets adopts law enforcement’s Manichean view of its task as defending civilization from the chaos originating in faceless, forbidding, and frustrating American cities that threaten to spin out of control at any moment.

Simon’s mammoth book, to its many admirers, is a masterpiece of field research, vigilant observation, and critical analysis that confronts uncomfortable truths about race, class, politics, and crime in late 20th-Century urban America. Wilson’s article, however, reminds Simon’s audience that A Year on the Killing Streets is not the objective account that the author’s comments about the differences between book and television claim to be. This judgment can neither diminish Simon’s superlative writing in A Year on the Killing Streets nor dismiss its extensive study of American policing because the book’s literary fineness is as impressive as its vivid reportage. Simon, simply stated, is a gifted author whose control of language, theme, symbol, and pace gives A Year on the Killing Streets a novelistic quality that predicts his attentive, elegant, and darkly humorous television writing.

Perhaps the best example of how the book fuses journalism, social conscience, literary prose, and police populism is the section that recounts the discovery of the corpse of LaTanya (sometimes spelled as La-Tonya or Latonya) Kim Wallace, an 11-year-old African-American girl dumped in a Baltimore alleyway after being molested, strangled, and disemboweled:

It is the illusion of tears and nothing more, the rainwater that collects in small beads and runs to the hollows of her face. The dark brown eyes are fixed wide, staring across wet pavement; jet black braids of hair surround the deep brown skin, high cheekbones and a pert, upturned nose. The lips are parted and curled in a slight, vague frown. She is beautiful, even now. . . .

Among the detectives and patrol officers crowded over the body of Latonya Kim Wallace there is no easy banter, no coarse exchange of cop humor or time-worn indifference. Jay Landsman offers only clinical, declarative statements as he moves through the scene. Tom Pellegrini stands mute in the light rain, sketching the surroundings on a damp notebook page. Behind them, against the rear wall of a rowhouse, leans one of the first Central District officers to arrive at the scene, one hand on his gun belt, the other absently holding his radio mike.

“Cold,” he says, almost to himself.

From the moment of discovery, Latonya Wallace is never regarded as anything less than a true victim, innocent as few of those murdered in this city ever are. A child, a fifth-grader, has been used and discarded, a monstrous sacrifice to an unmistakable evil.27

This passage emblematizes Simon’s authorial talent by offering lucid sensory details that re-create Wallace’s murder scene yet emphasize its emotional aridity by underscoring the near silence that overtakes the assembled officers and detectives. Simon reverses his reader’s expectations by noting how the detectives refuse the gallows humor that characterizes every previous crime scene that A Year on the Killing Streets records. The passage’s richness of detail contrasts with its starkness of feeling to prepare the reader for the final paragraph’s moralizing conclusion. Mentioning monstrosity, sacrifice, and evil reveals the suppressed horror that the officers and narrator feel but do not verbally express.

Identifying Wallace as a “true victim” purer than most murdered people, whom the killer has treated as garbage, transforms the girl into an angelic symbol while juxtaposing good and evil so effectively that Pellegrini, the primary investigator, must now avenge Wallace’s death if he wishes to right this hideous wrong. The police, as this excerpt concludes, no longer serve as simple investigators but rather as populist defenders of the city’s vulnerable children, meaning that they become metaphysical defenders of innocence itself.

This passage also substantiates Christopher P. Wilson’s point that A Year on the Killing Streets cannot reproduce true journalism’s impartiality. Simon synthesizes clinical observation with moral passion to represent the homicide detective, in true cop-shop fashion, as what Wilson calls “a dedicated, hardbitten knight of the city”28 who seeks truth, pursues justice, and bears witness for defenseless victims. Depicting homicide detectives in this fashion positions Simon’s book as an exemplary cop-shop narrative that exhibits “a long-recognized double-edged potential in populist ideology . . . that [is] progressive and reactionary, liberal and authoritarian all at once.”29

Such contrary motives lead Simon to merge dispassionate observation, righteous indignation, and conscientious police work into a powerful vignette that dismantles all claims to objectivity. The Wallace murder—fictionalized in Homicide as the never-closed Adena Watson case—is the book’s primary example of a red-ball investigation, or, as Simon baldly defines this term, “murders that matter.”30 Although homicide detectives may repudiate caring about motive or morality, their practiced world-weariness extends only so far. The emotional attrition of working as murder police, therefore, requires detachment, dark humor, and defensive cynicism. The homicide detective, according to Simon’s book, “gives what he can afford to give and no more” by “carefully measur[ing] out the required amount of energy and emotion” before he “closes the file and moves on to the next call.”31 For the best investigators, however, this dispassion never becomes psychological numbness.

This sympathetic portrait of homicide detectives proves that A Year on the Killing Streets, far from offering a neutral account of their grim work, weaves symbols, themes, and tropes about justice, morality, and religion throughout its narrative, bringing it closer to Homicide’s imaginary portrait of Baltimore than Simon may care to admit. The television series, indeed, reproduces the book’s tone better than Simon recognizes, so much so that most episodes disrupt the documentary approach that Barry Levinson creates in “Gone for Goode” with flashbacks, surreal images, musical montages, and repeated scenes. Homicide develops into a faithful adaptation of A Year on the Killing Streets that, by employing stylized visual, aural, and storytelling strategies to modulate the program’s sharp dialogue, naturalistic performances, and realistic settings, combines imaginative extrapolation with memorable imagery to produce an artistic work that reflects, even as it transcends, reality.

5. Three Men & A Meeting

David Simon, in fact, masters these narrative techniques during his tenure at Homicide thanks to Tom Fontana’s guidance. Simon’s participation in writing five noteworthy Homicide episodes best illustrates his flair for melding fact, fantasy, and fiction into compelling episodic drama while predicting the excellent television that he will create after Homicide ceases production. Examining “Bop Gun” (2.4), “Bad Medicine” (5.4), Parts 2 and 3 of “Blood Ties” (6.2 and 6.3), and “Sideshow (Part 2)” (7.15) in light of Fontana’s Emmy-winning script for “Three Men and Adena” (1.6) demonstrates the storytelling gifts that permit Simon to craft The Corner’s unflinching depiction of inner-city drug addiction and The Wire’s unparalleled portrait of urban decline.

“Three Men and Adena” may be Homicide’s best-known and best-reviewed episode.32 The story takes place almost entirely in “The Box,” the Homicide Unit’s stark, functional, and unattractive interrogation room. Detectives Bayliss and Pembleton interrogate Risley Tucker (Moses Gunn), Bayliss’s prime suspect in Adena Watson’s murder, for 12 hours to elicit a confession. Tucker, an “Arabber” who sells fruits and vegetables from a horse-drawn cart that roams Baltimore’s many neighborhoods (a nomadic existence that marks Tucker as untrustworthy in the eyes of many residents, including Adena’s mother), has been interrogated on two previous occasions, making this third attempt the final time that Bayliss and Pembleton can legally question him.

“Three Men and Adena” adapts a relatively short passage from A Year on the Killing Streets into a remarkable hour of television that is, as John Leonard notes in Theodore Bogosian’s excellent documentary Anatomy of a “Homicide: Life on the Street,” a masterpiece of writing, setting, and acting that exceeds “Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden . . . and a number of Don DeLillo novels about what happens to men in small rooms.”33 Simon’s book recounts how detectives Tom Pellegrini and Harry Edgerton question a suspect called “The Fish Man, as he has long been known in the neighborhood,” a “fifty-one-year-old living alone in a second-floor apartment across the street from his [fish] store” and a “grizzled, time-worn piece of work [who] was quite friendly with Latonya [Kim Wallace]—a little too friendly, as far as the child’s family was concerned.”34

“Three Men and Adena” transforms the Fish Man into Arabber Risley Tucker to dramatize the fissures of race, class, age, and gender that crime drama frequently portrays but rarely interrogates as maturely as Fontana’s script does. This episode allows Tucker, after enduring alternately respectful, scornful, friendly, and angry questioning by Bayliss and Pembleton, to reverse the interrogation’s dynamic by articulating the emotional baggage that defines both detectives. Tucker calls Pembleton a member of the “Five Hundreds,” or a successful and professional Black man who condescends to working-class “colored folk” such as Tucker, before accusing Pembleton of hating himself for chasing “the white dream” rather than authentically connecting with his racial roots.

Tucker also verbally attacks Bayliss by comparing him to the white plantation owners who raped enslaved women, claiming that Bayliss not only carries a darkness inside himself that terrifies the detective but also fears being perceived as an amateur by his colleagues. Tucker, in a long monologue, then mournfully tells both detectives how he (Tucker) talked with Adena as often as possible, how he noticed the small details of her behavior, and how he came to adore her. Tucker weeps, finally confessing that, to the profound shame of a man in his sixties, “the one great love of my life was an 11-year-old girl.” Tucker, however, never admits to killing Adena. The episode concludes with Pembleton certain that Tucker murdered Adena, Bayliss unsure about this possibility, and Tucker watching the squad room’s television before being set free.

Fontana’s rich, provocative, and perceptive script questions the possibility that homicide detectives can conclusively determine the truth during any investigation. As Richard Clark Sterne argues when comparing “Three Men and Adena” to NYPD Blue’s more conventional interrogation scenes, Fontana’s Homicide episode “evokes with an insight rare in television fiction mutual tensions and distrust” between African Americans and police departments “that can militate against the establishment of ‘the facts’ in a police interrogation.”35 Tucker’s ability to recognize the inner doubts, fears, and inadequacies that afflict Pembleton and Bayliss reflects a street vendor’s talent for observing people, while Tucker’s success at undermining the self-assured demeanor of even so confident a character as Pembleton illustrates how uncertain a venture investigating homicide cases is.

Although Pellegrini’s and Edgerton’s questioning of the Fish Man doesn’t see this lonely, middle-aged store owner take control of the interrogation in the same way that Tucker does in “Three Men and Adena,” Fontana’s episode illuminates two important truths about police work that A Year on the Killing Streets also emphasizes. The first lesson may surprise viewers accustomed to the cop-drama convention of crack detectives pursuing every possible lead en route to solving each week’s case: “Even with the murders themselves,” Simon writes, “much of what clears a case amounts to pure chance.”36 The second lesson involves the “detective’s Holy Trinity, which states that three things solve crimes: Physical evidence. Witnesses. Confessions.”37

Fontana’s script incisively dramatizes each element by depicting a long interrogation in which Bayliss and Pembleton offer so much physical evidence against Tucker that the viewer initially takes this information to be overwhelming. The moment when Pembleton rips a map (of the neighborhood where Adena’s body was discovered) off the wall to reveal grisly photos of her mutilated corpse is especially effective. Tucker, however, is neither as shocked nor as saddened as Bayliss hopes, thereby diminishing Bayliss’s attempt to force him to recognize just how horrific Adena’s death is.

Tucker never confesses to murder but, by revealing his shameful love for the young girl, demonstrates why, according to A Year on the Killing Streets, “the detective’s trinity ignores motivation, which matters little to most investigations. The best work of Dashiell Hammett and Agatha Christie”—to say nothing of police dramas such as Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue, and Law & Order—“argues that to track a murderer, the motive must first be established; in Baltimore, if not on the Orient Express, a known motive can be interesting, even helpful, yet it is often beside the point.”38

“Three Men and Adena” exposes Tucker’s reason for consenting to a third interrogation as his twisted need to purge the pedophiliac feelings he holds for Adena. This unexpectedly tragic motive fails to secure a confession that justifies Bayliss’s frenzied work on the case, Pembleton’s belief in Tucker’s guilt, or the viewer’s expectation that the episode will see justice done by tricking Tucker into admitting his complicity in butchering a child. “Three Men and Adena,” thanks to Fontana’s firm control of all dramatic elements, even invalidates the Year on the Killing Streets passage that summarily dismisses the significance of determining a killer’s motive: “Fuck the why, a detective will tell you; find out the how, and nine times out of ten it’ll give you the who.”39

Bayliss and Pembleton know how the girl was murdered, but this information cannot tell them who committed the crime despite their best suspicions. Bayliss’s misgivings about Tucker’s culpability mark the episode’s final statement about the ambiguity of establishing guilt and innocence. “Three Men and Adena” smartly upends the expectations of its genre and its source material to undermine the efficacy of the investigative methods that Simon’s authoritative book recounts.

This accomplishment illustrates the capacity of skillful television drama to challenge its viewer’s preconceptions. Fontana’s script, beyond inspiring Andre Braugher, Kyle Secor, and Moses Gunn to deliver extraordinary performances, also sets a pattern for Homicide’s writers (including Simon) to follow. Simon’s best scripts for the program capture police work’s frequently disappointing realities while indulging the artistic liberties, strategies, and techniques unique to episodic television drama.

6. Gunning for Cover

David Simon’s first Homicide: Life on the Street episode, “Bop Gun” (2.4), written in collaboration with David Mills and based on a story by Tom Fontana, displays Homicide’s penchant for musical montage, crosscutting, and realistic portrayals of homicide detectives’ indifference to the crimes they investigate.40 Iowa tourist Catherine Ellison is murdered when three young men rob her, her husband Robert (Robin Williams), and her two children, Abby (Julia Devin) and Matt (Jake Gyllenhaal), at gunpoint. Catherine refuses to relinquish a golden locket, then receives a fatal gunshot that sets the story’s emotional dynamic into motion.

The episode’s teaser (the sequence that precedes its opening credits) is a terrific montage that intercuts images of the Ellisons enjoying a walking tour of Baltimore’s sights (including Camden Yards) while consulting a guidebook; of three young men—Vaughn Perkins (Lloyd Goodman), Marvin (Antonio D. Charity), and Tweety (Vincent Miller)—playing basketball in an alleyway until Marvin brandishes a .45 pistol; and of detectives Beau Felton (Daniel Baldwin) and Kay Howard (Melissa Leo) going about their daily routine while Seal’s song “Killer” plays over the soundtrack.

When Perkins, Marvin, and Tweety see the Ellisons walking down a street, still looking for tourist spots, the men, clearly intending to rob the family, move toward them. “Bop Gun” follows Robert Ellison as he gives Felton and Howard information about the crime, makes arrangements for his wife’s remains to be returned to Iowa, comforts his children, and expresses shame at being too afraid to intervene during the robbery. Felton, Howard, Tim Bayliss, and Meldrick Lewis eventually arrest, interrogate, and charge Tweety, Marvin, and Perkins, but even Perkins’s conviction cannot relieve the anger, confusion, and grief that Robert Ellison experiences.

The episode’s signature scene comes when Ellison overhears Felton, Howard, and Detective John Munch (Richard Belzer) joking about how Ellison described the gun that shot Catherine as “big and metal.” When Felton enthusiastically remarks, “I am telling you, I am going to rack up the overtime on this one” (the case has become an instant red ball because it involves a tourist’s death), Ellison demands that Felton be removed from the investigation.

Lieutenant Al Giardello (Yaphet Kotto), Homicide’s shift commander and Felton’s superior officer, explains his detective’s seemingly cold attitude to Ellison: “A few weeks ago, he was working on a father of four shot in East Baltimore. After that, a domestic stabbing and, after that, a drug shooting in a project where an innocent bystander was killed. And next week, it will be somebody else. He’s not going to feel what you feel. None of us are.” Ellison comments that Giardello is not as insensitive as Felton, causing the lieutenant to say, “Mr. Ellison, I can still remember the first murder I ever handled. . . . I can’t remember my fiftieth or my fortieth. None of us can. But the only difference between Felton and the rest of us is that he doesn’t have the patience to hide that fact. You need him to solve your murder, not to grieve.”

This unsentimental dialogue reflects A Year on the Killing Streets’s casual attitude toward homicide. David Simon, in Theodore Bogosian’s documentary Anatomy of a “Homicide: Life on the Street,” stresses this scene’s authenticity by noting that Felton’s overtime comment is “a conversation that would happen. It would happen in any homicide unit anywhere in America, and when I saw it actually being acted out, I, I got a real kick in the pants because I thought, ‘Wherever they are, homicide cops are watching this and they’re cracking up ’cause they know how true it is.’”

Williams’s, Baldwin’s, and Kotto’s excellent performances enhance the moment’s realism, while Ellison’s grief—he later cries while clutching his wife’s nightgown—adds an emotional poignancy that counteracts Felton’s unfeeling attitude. The fact that Ellison’s children, lying in bed in the next room, hear him weep transforms “Bop Gun” into a touching, resonant, and accurate portrait of human anguish. Simon and Mills don’t downplay the family’s sadness but allow Felton’s insensitivity to cast the Ellisons’ heartache into even greater relief.

“Bop Gun” employs visual and aural techniques whose narrative effects A Year on the Killing Streets cannot replicate. The teaser resembles a music video, but juxtaposing the disparate behavior of the unsuspecting Ellisons, the initially jovial yet larcenous basketball players, and the seen-it-all-before banter between Felton and Howard foreshadows how these people’s lives will violently intersect before underscoring how tenuous human life, freedom, and safety are. The episode repeats this opening sequence’s parallel editing during Marvin’s and Tweety’s dual interrogations. While Felton and Lewis question Marvin in The Box, Howard and Detective Stanley Bolander (Ned Beatty) grill Tweety in The Box’s observation room as Public Enemy’s “Get Off My Back” provides the scene’s dialogue.

Rather than resorting to the longer, more deliberate interrogations that characterize other Homicide episodes and Simon’s A Year on the Killing Streets, this short montage adroitly intercuts Marvin’s and Tweety’s interviews to demonstrate how homicide detectives play suspects against one another, how they upset each man’s intellectual equilibrium, and how they exhaust each arrestee’s emotional endurance. The sequence’s brevity distorts the actual time such interrogations require, yet emphasizes their inherent unpleasantness. An agitated Tweety eventually offers information despite Marvin remaining stoic, with Tweety mentioning that Vaughn Perkins was provoked by Catherine Ellison’s refusal to hand over her locket. This statement culminates a frenetic scene whose jump cuts reflect the intensity that Tweety and Marvin experience while under interrogation.

“Bop Gun” also deals with issues of race and justice. Giardello asks Kay Howard, a detective with a perfect case-clearance rate, to look into the Ellison investigation because its implications trouble him. When Giardello doubts that his superiors would demand results if the victim were a Black Baltimore woman rather than a white female tourist, the episode briefly (but effectively) acknowledges the regrettable truth that American society privileges homicide victims based on their racial and socioeconomic background. Giardello’s statements lead Howard to observe Perkins’s interrogation, in which Perkins seems genuinely remorseful, even asking to write a letter of apology to Robert Ellison.

Based on this behavior, Howard wonders whether Perkins truly shot Catherine Ellison or whether he is confessing to the crime to protect Marvin from prosecution. Simon and Mills, in a further example of Homicide’s penchant for telling ambiguous crime stories, never resolve Howard’s doubts. When she visits Perkins in prison, he, having converted to Islam, claims the Ellison shooting as his own. Howard, although she agrees with Felton when he says that she should never have distrusted Perkins’s guilt, seems uncertain about this prospect. Melissa Leo’s carefully modulated acting throughout “Bop Gun,” particularly in Howard’s final scene with Perkins, stresses the ambivalence that haunts police detectives when determining guilt and innocence. Simon’s contributions to this episode give it an authentic sense of procedure, atmosphere, and tone that exposes the emotional, intellectual, and legal complexities that confront homicide detectives charged with conducting murder investigations.

7. The Bad & The Bard

“Bad Medicine” (5.4), by contrast, features a more self-consciously literary style.41 Simon’s script for this episode, based on a story by Tom Fontana and Julie Martin, sees Meldrick Lewis team with Terri Stivers (Toni Lewis), a narcotics detective investigating several deaths that result from people snorting, shooting, or smoking impure heroin. The victims, in a small but important detail, belong to all gender, racial, and socioeconomic groups, reflecting the tragic reality of Baltimore’s drug abuse. Simon, indeed, bases this storyline on several actual Baltimore deaths caused by ingesting heroin laced with the alkaloid drug scopolamine.42

Lewis and Stivers connect this bad heroin to Luther Mahoney (Erik Todd Dellums), a man they suspect of being one of the city’s most prominent drug moguls. Mahoney, first encountered by Lewis and Mike Kellerman in “The Damage Done” (4.19), works as a community activist and philanthropist to cover his illegal activities. Mahoney becomes a recurring nemesis for the Homicide Unit throughout Season Five, but “Bad Medicine” showcases his charm, intelligence, and unflappability.

Dellums plays the role with cultured menace, particularly when Lewis and Stivers interrogate Mahoney about the killings of two low-level drug dealers named Bo-Jack Reed and Carlton Phipps. The detectives suspect that Mahoney has ordered these slayings, so Stivers invites him to the squad room for a chat. Mahoney arrives in an expensive sports-utility vehicle wearing upscale clothing, only to find himself handcuffed to The Box’s table. Mahoney, however, willingly participates in the interrogation, condescending to Lewis and Stivers by playing along with them in a scene that captures Simon’s talent for good dialogue. Lewis begins by saying that a witness has identified Mahoney as the man behind the murders.

MAHONEY. Are you suggesting a motive?

LEWIS. Well, we have, uh, say, your theoretical drug slinger and, you know, he’s marketing a viable product, proper purity, proper cut, until some no-name, know-nothing, old-school, just-out-of-Jessup knucklehead starts messing around with his home chemistry set and he starts killing off the customers quick.

STIVERS. As opposed to killing them slow.

LEWIS. Even if this drug slinger—this theoretical drug slinger—was, was a reasonable man, I mean, your guy might be compelled to act.

MAHONEY. You know, your case makes sense. I like it.

LEWIS. I like it, too.

MAHONEY. Except I don’t sling bags and I didn’t kill Bo-Jack Reed.

STIVERS. Then who did?

MAHONEY. A guy named Carlton Phipps.

LEWIS. No, he’s dead, too.

MAHONEY. You know, I heard that.

LEWIS (sighs). See, our problem is that we don’t have any way of connecting Carlton Phipps with the murder of Bo-Jack Reed. (Mahoney raises his hand and shrugs.) Well, see, I worked that case. I talked to Carlton’s people. You know what they told me? They said that he was despondent, that he may even have taken his own life.

MAHONEY. He killed himself? He shot himself in the back of the head? Who are you fooling? He was murdered. Bo-Jack’s people came back on him. I mean, he had the gun that killed Bo-Jack right on the table—(Mahoney stops, realizing he’s given away too much.)

LEWIS (laughs). Let me ask you this: How you know where Carlton caught that bullet? And let me ask you this: How in the hell’d you know what was on the table in front of the man?

MAHONEY. Well, the word was all over about what happened to Carlton.

LEWIS (laughs as he and Stivers move to exit). Oh, Luther, Luther, Luther, you just fell for the oldest trick we got, baby.

MAHONEY. I want a lawyer.

LEWIS. I bet you do.

This interrogation initially parallels “Three Men and Adena” when Mahoney, like Risley Tucker, reverses the usual dynamic by quietly taking control of the questioning. Mahoney compliments Lewis’s theory, denies involvement in the crime, and offers crucial information. Lewis’s ploy, however, becomes clear when his effusive discussion of the investigation’s problems prompts Mahoney to provide details about the crime scene never released to the public. Lewis lies to Mahoney, who realizes too late that he’s inadvertently implicated himself in Phipps’s murder. Mahoney, however, doesn’t become flustered, angry, or truculent (as so many suspects before him have when tricked into revealing their complicity in violent crimes). Mahoney says that news of Phipps’s death was common knowledge, then requests legal representation to protect his interests. The scene is an exemplary verbal sparring match that ranks among Homicide’s best interrogations, with Erik Todd Dellums and Clark Johnson delivering effective performances.

Mahoney’s calm response is justified, as Lewis and Stivers discover when they later talk with Assistant State’s Attorney (ASA) Ed Danvers (Željko Ivanek), who tells them that, since the door to Phipps’s house was unlocked before his corpse was discovered, anyone in the neighborhood could have learned the details that Lewis has withheld from press reports. Mahoney is set free the next morning, ruefully smiling as he steps into his chauffeured vehicle. This pattern repeats during much of Season Five, with the Homicide Squad suspecting Mahoney of drug-related murders for which no conclusive evidence exists. The squad’s inability to jail Mahoney reflects the difficulty of securing drug convictions, but the character himself seems preternaturally calm during almost every appearance. This fact leads David Simon, in the “Inside Homicide” documentary, to declare, “to me, honestly, the character was always a little arch, again not resembling the drug traffickers that I knew in Baltimore in any sense.”

Simon then identifies Mahoney as a Shakespearean villain whose sophisticated persona avoids stereotypical portrayals of the thuggish drug dealer, although Simon might also have compared Mahoney to the master villains that populate the mystery fiction of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, and Patricia Highsmith. The apparent naturalism of “Bad Medicine” reveals itself as a literary construct that privileges Mahoney, making him more refined than the drug dealers whom Simon and Ed Burns profile in The Corner (both the book and the miniseries) and whom The Wire authentically depicts.

“Bad Medicine,” however, demonstrates how the literary strategy of giving a fictional work’s protagonists worthy adversaries offers Homicide a classical storytelling integrity that the series normally evades when striving for realistic accounts of urban police work. This episode allows Simon to extend his dramatic range by fashioning one of Homicide’s most memorable, intriguing, and complicated characters, even if Luther Mahoney is, in the end, larger than life.

8. Cry Us a River

David Simon’s work on Parts 2 and 3 of “Blood Ties” combines his skillful characterization, fluid dialogue, and political savvy into episodes of rare power. These final two segments of the three-part storyline that opens Homicide’s sixth season (based on stories by Tom Fontana, Julie Martin, and James Yoshimura) trace the racial, socioeconomic, and political ramifications of the murder of Malia Brierre, a domestic servant employed by wealthy philanthropist Felix Wilson (James Earl Jones), one of Baltimore’s most respected citizens.

Wilson, known as Fabulous Felix, has earned his fortune by mass-producing cookies, doughnuts, cupcakes, and other confections (the character is loosely based on Wallace Amos, founder of the Famous Amos cookie brand43). Brierre’s corpse is discovered in the men’s room of the Belvedere Hotel during a black-tie gala that honors Wilson’s charitable contributions to Baltimore’s African-American community. Giardello, an old friend of Wilson’s wife, Regina (Lynne Thigpen), attends the event, only to see Pembleton, the primary investigator, interrupt the proceedings to begin questioning attendees. Neither Pembleton nor Giardello considers the Wilsons or their children, Hal (Jeffrey Wright) and Thea (Ellen Bethea), to be suspects, instead professing respect for Felix Wilson’s generosity to Baltimore’s civic life.

“Blood Ties (Part 2)” (6.2) examines the racial divisions among the Homicide Unit’s squad.44 Simon’s script acknowledges its principal characters’ tangled racial feelings in three powerful scenes that illustrate how Homicide, in Thomas A. Mascaro’s words, “depict[s] not ‘The Black Man’ but a wide range of blackness among the population of black men. As with real-life racial interactions, Homicide [is] complex” by portraying “African American men who [have] the freedom to sculpt their own identities while negotiating with whites and each other as they [enforce] the law.”45

Pembleton, Homicide’s most dynamic and intelligent character, confronts three accusations from detectives Stuart Gharty (Peter Gerety) and Laura Ballard (Callie Thorne) that he protects Wilson from criminal scrutiny due to his (Pembleton’s) racial allegiance to a powerful Black man. During the first, Gharty and Ballard discuss the case while driving to the squad room after questioning Hal Wilson. Ballard—who has recently arrived in Baltimore from Seattle, Washington—says that her friends and family call Baltimore a tough town and a hard-core place, meaning that it is a Black city. Ballard disagrees with how Pembleton investigates the case, thinking that the police should obtain hair and blood samples from Felix and Hal to determine their involvement with Brierre, who had sexual intercourse not long before her murder.

Ballard then claims that Pembleton perceives suspecting the Wilsons of murder as evidence of racism, prompting Gharty to offer this blunt assessment of the Homicide Unit’s racial politics:

GHARTY. Even if Pembleton wasn’t the primary, say you caught the case. You think you could work this murder the way you want? Not a chance in hell. Giardello would still be in our faces, still maneuvering to protect Wilson and his family. All I’m saying is, you and I, we’re just working the case, just taking in the facts, trying to identify suspects, uh, through simple common sense. Giardello and Pembleton, they are covering Wilson’s ass because Wilson’s ass is the same color as theirs.

BALLARD. Okay, hold up a second.

GHARTY. It is what it is. I’m not saying that Giardello is a bad lieutenant. I’m not saying that I think Pembelton is a lousy cop, but the racial stuff on this case is right there on the table. Nobody’s talking about it, but it’s there.

This discussion highlights the perception among white detectives that Black men protect their own. Ballard’s discomfort with Gharty’s description of Giardello and Pembleton as racial “ass kissers” offers only temporary disagreement to Gharty’s statement that he and Ballard employ common sense to investigate the case while Giardello and Pembleton pursue ulterior agendas. Gharty considers his position to be neutral, but concluding that his African-American colleagues make decisions based solely on race endorses the unexamined bias that Black men place their racial loyalties above all other concerns.

Pembleton’s and Giardello’s refusal to suspect Felix and Hal may seem unusual until the viewer recalls that no physical evidence points to either man, even if determining Felix’s and Hal’s involvement with Brierre, as Ballard indicates, is a wise investigative decision that may substantiate each man’s innocence. The circumstantial case that Gharty and Ballard construct against the Wilsons, however, is flimsy, as Pembleton and Giardello later note.

Gharty also ignores two key points. Giardello’s close friendship with Regina Wilson motivates his defense of the Wilson family, while Pembleton defers to Felix more out of respect for the man’s accomplishments than his race. Pembleton, who admires Wilson’s initiative, intelligence, and compassion, praises Wilson’s charitable work in all three “Blood Ties” episodes. Pembleton cannot ignore how Wilson has overcome the humble life of an East Baltimore project child to achieve financial prominence, yet continues to maintain close ties with the city’s working-class and poor residents.

This admiration, however, contains a racial element that makes the episode’s political stance more ambivalent. The event honoring Wilson’s philanthropy acknowledges the man’s support of African-American causes, particularly education, to suggest that Pembleton cannot fully separate race from class. The scene immediately following Gharty and Ballard’s conversation, however, finds Pembleton doing exactly that while conversing with Bayliss. Pembleton claims not to lean on race, telling Bayliss that “since my first day on patrol, I’ve worked this job as hard as it can be worked. I ask no quarter, I give no quarter. When people think of Frank Pembleton, they don’t think in terms of Black or white. On the street, in The Box, on the witness stand, I come to people as a cop, a detective.”

Pembleton emphasizes that the Wilsons’ status as Black Americans doesn’t affect his investigative judgment, but Pembleton’s need to articulate this caveat illustrates his sensitivity to accusations of racial bias. Pembleton also asserts his credentials as a cop above his status as a Black American, demonstrating how nimbly Simon reflects the competing personae that Pembleton must integrate into his workplace identity as a dogged, determined, and gifted detective.

This reality underscores the double consciousness that Pembleton must negotiate as a police officer of African descent but that Bayliss, Gharty, and Ballard do not. Pembleton’s talent as an investigator never fully overcomes his racial identity, making the third scene that Simon includes in “Blood Ties (Part 2)” even more significant as a statement about preferential treatment. Giardello angrily tells Pembleton, Bayliss, Gharty, and Ballard that the Baltimore Sun’s crime reporter has learned important details about the case nearly as soon as the lieutenant has, leading Giardello to suspect that someone inside the department has leaked the information.

Pembleton distrustfully glances at Ballard, provoking an argument that reveals the fundamental grievances that each detective holds. Ballard thinks that Felix’s and Hal’s proximity to Brierre, when coupled with Brierre’s beauty, makes them suspects, but this conclusion troubles Pembleton:

PEMBLETON. Because we all know that Black men can’t control themselves when it comes to loose shoes and tight pants.

BAYLISS. Hey, Frank. Frank! No one is saying that.

BALLARD. What I’m saying is that these people—

PEMBLETON. These people?

BALLARD. Black, white, or blue, Pembleton.

PEMBLETON. So you can prove once again that you can take the nigger out of the ghetto but not the ghetto out of the nigger, is that it?

BALLARD. Are you joking? All I want is some straight answers.

Bayliss’s response casts Pembleton’s statement about sexually voracious Black men as an oversensitive reaction to Ballard’s point, but Pembleton doesn’t relent. Referring to “ghetto niggers” intensifies the dispute, causing Ballard to suggest that Pembleton deliberately misreads her comment to infer racist implications that don’t exist. Gharty then claims that the Wilsons’ reputation won’t suffer from police scrutiny because the family has half of City Hall, Giardello, and Pembleton in their pocket:

PEMBLETON. Excuse me, I’m in someone’s pocket?

GHARTY. Hey, this is Baltimore. They’re Black, successful. That’s the deal. End of story. This is your city, Pembleton. Your house. Your department. Your rules.

PEMBLETON. Oh, so it wasn’t that way when the Italians ran it or when the Irish owned it? How many favors have been called in in the name of the Knights of Columbus or the St. Michael’s Society, huh?

Pembleton refutes Gharty’s statement about African Americans privileging themselves within the Baltimore Police Department by reminding Gharty that departmental favoritism has long depended on ethnicity. Pembleton also illustrates the subtle point that these racial and ethnic groups resemble one another more than they diverge by using bureaucratic power to benefit their own members. Pembleton, indeed, doesn’t deny that race and ethnicity are factors in investigative or administrative decisions but instead places this lamentable truth in its broader historical context.

The scene’s most explosive exchange, however, occurs when Gharty, upset by the special treatment that the Wilsons have received, tells Pembleton, “You’re the errand boy here, not me.”

PEMBLETON. I’m a boy now?

GHARTY. Oh, don’t bait me, you son of a bitch! I didn’t use the word that way! I didn’t use the word that way!

PEMBLETON. Why don’t you crawl up to one of those, uh, Hampden gin mills and buy a round for your Irish brothers on me and, and cry the blues about how your time has passed, okay?

This heated confrontation depicts how rigidly each man clings to his preconceptions. The term errand boy may not have specific racist connotations in the context in which Gharty employs it, but his enraged reaction when Pembleton bristles at having the word boy applied to him suggests that Gharty thoughtlessly employs a term that has historically infantilized, diminished, and demeaned Black men.

Pembleton, in turn, again insults Gharty’s Irish background by accusing Gharty and his white brethren of bemoaning their reduced importance in the Baltimore Police Department’s new hierarchy. Pembleton recognizes a tendency in ethnic white men to claim positions of authority, power, and influence by unfairly excluding racial minorities but then complain that those same people—after years of struggle to achieve the authority that has been unjustly denied them—illegitimately usurp political power. The sense that history has abandoned white Americans (particularly white men) thereby justifies the prejudice that white men should control America’s centers of power to prevent African Americans from wrongly excluding white people from the political, social, and economic institutions that have historically oppressed and marginalized non-white peoples.

Pembleton and Gharty’s argument deftly criticizes institutional racism, ethnic grievances, and personal animus. David Simon prevents any single character from possessing the moral high ground, resulting in a scene whose political ambivalence produces rich dramatic texture. This quarrel’s rawness illustrates how honestly Homicide faces racial division and how capably Simon integrates socially realistic themes into his television writing. The situation becomes even more complex when Pembleton, enraged by his confrontation with Ballard, Bayliss, and Gharty, questions Felix to prove that the man had no reason to murder Brierre. Wilson, however, confesses to having consensual sexual intercourse with the young woman. Pembleton’s palpable disappointment at this news forces him to realize that Ballard’s concerns were justified. Wilson expresses shame at betraying his wife’s loyalty but soon hires an attorney to protect his legal interests, leaving Pembleton to re-evaluate his faith in Wilson’s rectitude.

“Blood Ties (Part 2)” is David Simon at his best. The episode, by shattering Felix’s spotless public image, forces Pembleton and Giardello to question their own assumptions about a heroic civic figure whom they respect, yet the story doesn’t certify Gharty’s careless accusations of racial bias and protectionism. The episode instead mines the ambiguities of American race relations to display the individual, institutional, and ideological compromises that the nation’s contested racial history forces upon its citizens.

This mature theme extends to “Blood Ties (Part 3)” (6.3) (cowritten by Simon and Anya Epstein, based on a story by Tom Fontana, Julie Martin, and James Yoshimura), as Pembleton, with Bayliss’s assistance, begins intensively investigating the Wilson family’s peccadilloes.46 Pembleton finds that Hal Wilson loved Brierre, going so far as to write passionate letters that he couldn't bring himself to deliver.

Hal, during an off-the-record conversation with Felix and Pembleton, confesses to murdering Brierre after he—furious with his father for betraying his mother, for seducing the much-younger Malia, and for stealing Hal’s beloved—confronted Brierre at the Belvedere Hotel. Hal’s misdirected anger led to homicide, but his confession exposes his tortured relationship with Felix:

HAL. You can question me ad nauseum, Detective. I’m not gonna answer.

FELIX. Yes you are.

HAL. What are you gonna do? Send me to my room? Cut off my allowance? Take off your belt and give me a good ass-whipping?

FELIX. I never punished you like that.

HAL. Maybe you should have.

FELIX. I denied you nothing. You wanted a pony, I got you a pony, a motorcycle, a computer, education, trips to Europe, a new car every year.

HAL. You couldn’t write a check big enough. You couldn’t pay me enough to compensate for having spent my entire life listening to your, your, your, your up-from-the-projects, East Baltimore war stories. Your history. Your journey. You denied me nothing? You denied me everything.

FELIX. What? You wanted your own place, your own history? You should have taken it, demanded it!

HAL. Well, you take what you want, Dad.

FELIX. Answer the detective’s question.

HAL. I’m a 28-year-old man. I don’t need you to tell me what to do anymore.

FELIX. Well, you’re 28 years old? You’re a grown man? Then act like a man instead of a pubescent child who stayed up late writing heartfelt letters to his puppy love and then didn’t have the courage to give them to her.

HAL. What do you know about love? You and Malia, that had nothing to do with love. That was about an old man chasing his spent youth. Must have taken a lot of courage, huh Dad, to deceive my mother.

FELIX (sighs). Well, I’ll claim that lie as my own. Which lies are yours, son?

This scene, marvelously acted by James Earl Jones and Jeffrey Wright, reveals the bitterness, inadequacy, and rage that Hal feels at being the son of a famous, powerful, and ambitious man whose achievements he will never surpass. Felix, for his part, not only criticizes his son’s sense of entitlement (fostered, Felix admits, by his own largesse) but also emphasizes Hal’s weakness. Their competing claims to manhood, when coupled with Felix’s fatherly disappointment, lay bare the contradictory passions that wealth, entitlement, parental indulgence, and filial jealousy evoke within a prominent, tight-knit, and secretive family.

The scene also illustrates David Simon’s and Anya Epstein’s authorial shrewdness by constructing a civilian interrogation in which Pembleton plays no active role. The detective merely watches the conversation between Felix and Hal develop, allowing the household drama unfolding before him to provide information necessary to closing the Brierre case. Felix becomes Pembleton’s unwitting stalking horse by sharply questioning Hal to get to the truth, which is uglier than Felix expected.

“Blood Ties (Part 3)” then obscures the investigation’s thorny racial and class implications by having Felix refuse Hal’s incarceration. The lack of direct evidence, along with Hal’s inadmissible confession (Pembleton doesn’t inform Hal of his Miranda rights before speaking with him), means that Hal can’t be arrested. When Pembleton returns to the Wilson estate, the family is preparing to move to San Diego, California. Pembleton says Hal cannot outrun Brierre’s murder, but Felix replies, “I’m gonna do everything in my power to make sure that he does.”

Pembleton wonders whether Felix can live with this decision, provoking an honest response from the older man: “I don’t know, but I’m sure as hell gonna try.” Felix, in other words, uses the power that his privilege conveys to keep his son out of prison, speaking to Felix’s sense that wealth exempts his family from punishment. Pembleton, who disagrees with Felix’s behavior in shielding Hal from the legal consequences of his crime, can reflect only on his (Pembleton’s) error in judgment.

Pembleton later tells Ballard that she was correct about the Wilson case: “Your instincts were dead-on. Mine, for once, were not.” The detectives don’t discuss racism, suggesting that Pembleton—who, earlier in “Blood Ties (Part 3),” tells his wife, Mary (Ami Brabson), that his personal feelings have affected the investigation—protects the Wilsons to preserve Felix’s reputation rather than helping a fellow Black man in a misguided attempt at racial comity.

David P. Kalat’s analysis of “Blood Ties (Part 3)” in his book “Homicide: Life on the Street”: The Unofficial Companion notes that Pembleton “is not the one-note supercop many fans would like him to be. Instead, he is a human being, with a complex set of motivations, one of which is vanity. Pembleton takes great pride in his instincts, and enjoys taking credit when his instincts close a case.”47 Pembleton’s apology to Ballard acknowledges this truth, which dissipates the racial bias that Gharty and Ballard believe characterizes Pembleton’s attitude. Kalat accurately summarizes the resulting complications: “Ultimately, Frank has so much respect for Felix Wilson that the detective allows his emotions to influence his instincts. This is not racist behavior on Frank’s part, merely a very human error that all of us are prone to make.”48 Pembleton stumbles during the Wilson investigation, which illustrates David Simon’s talent not only for realistic characterization but also for portraying homicide detectives as fallible human beings rather than as flawless investigators.

Giardello confesses to similar failings when reminding Pembleton that the Wilson case will remain open until they accrue enough evidence to charge Hal with Brierre’s murder: “For all the good the Wilsons did for this city, for the Black community, well, to you and I, that means nothing now. I was blindsided by my personal involvement. I refused to see the truth of their guilt.”

Race plays a minimal role in Giardello’s reaction. Loyalty to his friend Regina Wilson, rather than racial preference, dominates all other issues. “Blood Ties (Part 3)” shows the significant influence that emotion, friendship, and favoritism have on homicide investigations. The episode, like its predecessor, is a notable example of Homicide’s and Simon’s penchant for social realism by allowing Hal to get away with murder. Wealth, prominence, and privilege conspire to produce an ambivalent resolution that satisfies few characters or viewers.

9. Last Stands & Best-Laid Plans

If Parts 2 and 3 of “Blood Ties” demonstrate David Simon’s aptitude for complex characters, “Sideshow (Part 2)” (7.15) illustrates his control of intricate plots. “Sideshow (Part 2),” the concluding segment of Homicide’s third (and final) crossover event with Dick Wolf’s Law & Order, may feature the most elaborate storyline that Homicide ever attempted.49

This episode’s numerous subplots force a narrative fluency that Simon skillfully interweaves with good character moments for ASA Ed Danvers, Detective Rene Sheppard (Michael Michele), and Law & Order’s Assistant District Attorney (ADA) Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston). “Sideshow (Part 2)” continues the opening Law & Order segment’s politically charged investigation into the death of Janine McBride, a federal employee whose murder draws the notice of Independent Counsel William Dell (George Hearn), a man charged with probing the financial misdeeds of Bill Clinton’s presidential administration. Indeed, this episode originally aired on 19 February 1999, only seven days after Clinton was acquitted of impeachment resulting from Kenneth Starr’s real-life investigation into Clinton’s participation in the Vince Foster, Whitewater, and Monica Lewinsky scandals.

The episode’s cynical portrait of political power’s deleterious effect on the lives of civil servants predicts Simon’s later work on The Wire while highlighting how narcissistic the legal system can be. “Sideshow (Part 2)” poses a challenge for Simon in that he must continue numerous storylines begun in the first episode (written by Law & Order producer René Balcer). Although both programs’ writing staffs coordinated their efforts, Simon has the difficult task of constructing a satisfying resolution to the two-part episode’s complex plot, which suggests a criminal conspiracy emanating directly from the White House.

The true story of McBride’s death, however, is far less sinister than Dell believes in his quest to bring down the president by unveiling how McBride’s romantic encounters with two female federal employees spiral into jealousy, broken marriages, violence, and murder. “Sideshow (Part 2)” depicts a remarkably Byzantine police investigation that sees Munch and Sheppard partner with New York City detectives Lennie Briscoe (Jerry Orbach) and Reynaldo Curtis (Benjamin Bratt) to discover why McBride, a resident of Baltimore, is found dead in New York City.

Danvers and McCoy work together to protect the investigation’s integrity from interference by Dell’s office, resulting in Danvers losing his appointment as a Maryland state judge when Dell, reacting to Danvers’s insistence that an incarcerated witness be deposed before a Baltimore grand jury, exposes Danvers’s teenage membership in the Durham Street Raiders, an all-white street gang that severely beat an African-American man when Danvers was 14 years old. This revelation causes Giardello to call all Black officers, detectives, and administrators of the Baltimore Homicide Unit—including Colonel George Barnfather (Clayton LeBouef)—into his office to recommend that they support Danvers. Everyone agrees, but when Barnfather tells Giardello that no amount of support can salvage Danvers’s judicial nomination, Giardello simply responds, “He knows that.”

This subplot is only one of many that plays against the background of cutthroat Beltway politics, bureaucratic infighting, and sexual intrigue. Simon also includes Sheppard’s difficulties in recovering her reputation among her fellow detectives after she survives an assault by a drug suspect who savagely beats her with her own gun in “Shades of Gray” (7.10). Sheppard’s former partner, Meldrick Lewis, now avoids her, believing that she is physically incapable of backing him on the street. Perhaps more surprising is the discussion that Laura Ballard and Terri Stivers have while exercising in the squad’s gymnasium. Stivers lays part of the blame for Sheppard’s injuries on the detective herself, saying that Sheppard should not have pulled her service weapon if she was not prepared to fire it.

The tensions over this issue lead Sheppard to confront Stivers and to declare, in a drunken yet impassioned monologue at the Waterfront Bar (a pub co-owned by Lewis), that people must not only trust one another but also judge one another based on the totality of each person’s actions, not on one or two mistakes. Lewis tells Sheppard, “That’s what I’d want for myself,” but the scene concludes ambivalently when Sheppard decides to take a cab home. Sheppard’s problems with the squad are not resolved, while no one pledges to partner with her on the next case. Simon parallels Sheppard’s and Danvers’s disgrace to underscore the unfair treatment they both face and to reflect the episode’s larger theme of how mistrust in matters of sex, marriage, and politics unleashes forces that destroy relationships, careers, and lives.

“Sideshow (Part 2),” however, finally revolves around Independent Counsel Dell’s egotism. Dell utilizes his nearly unfettered power to investigate the private lives of several characters, including McCoy and Danvers, to fearsome effect. McCoy, in “Sideshow (Part 1),” is arrested for refusing to answer questions in front of Dell’s federal grand jury about his (McCoy’s) sexual relationships with two female colleagues and about the identity of an anonymous witness whose name he refuses to disclose. McCoy, in “Sideshow (Part 2),” sympathizes with Danvers regarding his shoddy treatment by Dell, even answering, “Hell yes!” when Danvers asks McCoy if pursuing the McBride investigation to the highest levels of the U.S. government frightens him.

Dell prevents Baltimore’s and New York’s police departments from concluding the McBride investigation by transferring witnesses, suspects, and defendants into his custody, then offering these people deals that abrogate justice for McBride’s family. Dell, in fact, grants immunity to Theodore Dawkins (Jimmy Ray Weeks), McBride’s killer and a former Drug Enforcement Agency officer working as a private investigator for the president’s chief of staff, in exchange for testimony that will damage the president’s reputation.

Although Danvers, McCoy, Munch, Sheppard, Briscoe, and Curtis determine that Dawkins acted alone in killing McBride, Dell doesn’t care. Danvers and McCoy confront Dell in a scene that illustrates the man’s inflated sense of importance:

DELL. There are larger issues at stake. This is more than a murder here.

DANVERS (scoffs). More than a murder?

DELL. Corruption at the highest level.

MCCOY. What proof do you have? Dawkins has no corroboration. All you’ve got is innuendo and allegation.

DANVERS. That’s all he needs. He set it up so that this case will never get to court. (to Dell) You don’t want a jury trial, a chance to determine who’s guilty and who’s not, because, let’s face it, the only case he can make in court stops with Theodore Dawkins. But outside a courtroom, at a press conference or an impeachment report to Congress, he can allege just about anything he wants.

MCCOY. And never have to prove a thing!

DELL. I remember when I was clerking at the Supreme Court, a justice asked me why it was that, inside the Beltway, the lawyering seemed so worthy and dignified, while outside the Beltway, the same kind of labor came off as savage and bitter. I told him I didn’t know. He smiled and explained that the lawyers outside the Beltway seemed so damn savage because the stakes are so damn small. (Moving to exit the room.) It’s been a pleasure, gentlemen.

Identifying McBride’s murder as a small-stakes event demeans Danvers’s and McCoy’s efforts to prosecute her killer while lionizing Dell’s own work, which Danvers identifies as petty political mudslinging. Simon writes resonant dialogue that, in less than three minutes, explores issues of injustice, political skullduggery, legal brinkmanship, and vaulting ambition. Apart from giving George Hearn, Želko Ivanek, and Sam Waterston the basis for superb performances, the scene also reveals the cynicism at the heart of all three branches of America’s federal government. “Sideshow (Part 2)” justifies its title by depicting Dell’s investigation as a distraction meant to glorify Dell’s political vendetta against the president, not as an attempt to find truth, to obtain justice, and to uphold law.

Although this episode may strike some viewers as a fictionalized defense of Bill Clinton’s presidency, “Sideshow (Part 2)” probes the criminal-justice system’s fault lines to conclude that this system is an uncaring, destructive, and repressive bureaucracy that thrives on ego. This attitude, so typical of Simon’s writing, demonstrates how different a crime drama Homicide is. Far from romanticizing police detectives and lawyers as defenders of justice, “Sideshow (Part 2),” like its parent series, depicts them as struggling civil servants who cannot ennoble, improve, or reform the institutions that employ them.

The episode’s final scene confirms this analysis by having Munch, Briscoe, and Curtis exit the Waterfront Bar, only to see the American flag flapping atop the Baltimore Police Department’s headquarters building. Munch sardonically salutes the flag, says, “I’m too damn sober,” and returns to the bar with Briscoe and Curtis in tow. Simon not only expresses the frustration, ennui, and disappointment that Dell’s defeat of the detectives’ investigation provokes but also concludes “Sideshow (Part 2)” more pessimistically than most other Homicide episodes.

This fact further establishes how David Simon’s contributions to Homicide help fictionalize the concerns, issues, and problems that A Year on the Killing Streets presents as nearly intractable. Neither the book nor the television series offers easy answers to the social challenges that crime, poverty, racism, and injustice pose to Americans living at the end of the 20th Century. Simon’s book may have inspired Homicide: Life on the Street to become one of the best, most thoughtful, and most progressive cop shows seen on American television, but this adaptation’s success results as much from Tom Fontana’s keen dramatic instincts as from Simon’s work.

Simon, thanks to Fontana’s (and Barry Levinson’s) mentorship, learns to transform his journalism into compelling, convincing, and socially realistic crime drama. This accolade, however, has limits. Homicide’s long network life didn’t depend upon Simon’s approval or dramatic gifts for its success, even if the series benefitted from his involvement. Simon, however, immeasurably profited from his professional relationship with Homicide. The series launched his television-writing career; taught him that television can powerfully dramatize his most pressing social, racial, and political concerns; and demonstrated how effective a fictional author Simon could be.

Homicide: Life on the Street, therefore, nurtured Simon’s narrative talents. This series, by telling unconventional stories about murder, crime, and police work, continued the tradition inaugurated by Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue but surpassed them in quirkiness, realism, and courage. Simon didn’t create, develop, or oversee Homicide, but his apprenticeship on this program educated him about all aspects of writing, producing, and sustaining worthwhile television drama.

This training equipped Simon to create The Corner, his incomparable HBO miniseries about Baltimore’s drug culture, and The Wire, the superlative social drama that became Simon’s masterpiece even if, as demonstrated under the harsh light of recent events, the Baltimore Police Department—like every other law-enforcement agency in the United States—deserves relentless skepticism rather than blind allegiance.

One truth about both programs is unassailable. Neither would’ve been possible without Homicide’s example, making Tom Fontana’s and Barry Levinson’s program a vital inspiration, influence, and development in David Simon’s television career. Thirty years after its premiere, Homicide: Life on the Street remains a terrific, thoughtful, and shouldn’t-be-forgotten example of American popular art that rewards the many hours that watching, enjoying, and thinking about it will inevitably provide.

FILES

Jason Vest's "Red Balls" (Violence Is Power, Chapter 3)

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Read Chapter 3 ("Red Balls: David Simon and Homicide: Life on the Street") of Vest's 2010 scholarly monograph "The Wire," "Deadwood," "Homicide," and "NYPD Blue": Violence Is Power. This file includes the full chapter, all endnotes, the book's full bibliography, and the book's full filmography.

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Homicide: Life on the Street 1.1_"Gone for Goode" Pilot Episode Teleplay (by Paul Attanasio)

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Read Paul Attanasio's complete teleplay for Homicide: Life on the Street's pilot episode ("Gone for Goode").

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Homicide: Life on the Street 1.6_"Three Men and Adena" Teleplay (by Tom Fontana)

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Read Tom Fontana's complete teleplay for Homicide: Life on the Street's Season 1 episode "Three Men and Adena."

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Law & Order 9.14: "Sideshow (Part 1)" Teleplay (by René Balcer)

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Read René Balcer's complete teleplay for Law & Order's Season 9 episode "Sideshow (Part 1)."

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Homicide: Life on the Street 7.15: "Sideshow (Part 2)" Teleplay (by David Simon)

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Read David Simon's complete teleplay for Homicide: Life on the Street's Season 7 episode "Sideshow (Part 2)."

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Tom Fontana Interview: TV Creators, Chapter 3 (by James L. Longworth, Jr.))

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Read Tom Fontana's complete interview with James L. Longworth, Jr. in Longworth's 2000 book TV Creators: Conversations with America's Top Producers of Television Drama.

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Richard Clark Sterne's Essay "NYPD Blue" (Prime Time Law)

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Read Richard Clark Sterne's essay "NYPD Blue," Chapter 7 of Robert M. Jarvis's & Paul R. Joseph's 1998 academic anthology Prime Time Law: Fictional Television as Legal Narrative.

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NOTES

*Note to The Vestibule’s subscribers: I penned this tribute to the late-great Michael K. Williams only a day or two after his 6 September 2021 death, mostly as a way to work through my shock and sadness at his passing.

Williams was one of America’s greatest actors, indeed one of the nation’s greatest artists, so his sudden demise made me think hard not only about what he meant to me personally but also to us, the American people, to say nothing of the world’s citizens, so famous had Williams become thanks to his breakout role as Omar Little in David Simon’s superb HBO drama The Wire (2002-2008).

Tough as it may be to accept, The Wire celebrated its 20th anniversary on 2 June 2022, making me think anew about Michael K. Williams’s contributions to national and international audiences, to acting, and to art.

As such, I publish this remembrance today, 6 June 2022, nine months after his passing and four days after the 20th anniversary The Wire’s inaugural broadcast, to commemorate the life of an American national treasure, who left us far, far too soon.

—All the best, Jason

1. Farewell, MKW

While driving through the streets of Maplewood, Missouri on 6 September 2021, I was shocked when Audie Cornish (co-host of National Public Radio’s All Things Considered) and Eric Deggans (NPR’s chief television critic) announced, just before 6pm, that Michael K. Williams had been found dead in his New York City apartment.1

“No!” I yelled at the radio. “No, it can’t be!”

This immediate response, I would learn in the hours and days to come, spoke for nearly every person I know who, like me, has long admired Williams’s film and television acting, to say nothing of his public commitment to social justice.  

As difficult as it may be to believe, 20 years have passed since Williams first came to prominence by playing Omar Little in David Simon’s HBO masterpiece The Wire (2002-2008). Even more shattering is the knowledge that Williams didn’t survive to celebrate this program’s 20th anniversary or, just as bad, bask in the happiness generated by his Emmy nomination for playing Montrose Freeman in Misha Green’s wily adaptation of Matt Ruff’s novel Lovecraft Country (again for HBO).2

Indeed, calling Michael K. Williams “Mr. HBO” seems reasonable enough considering how frequently he appeared in prestige dramas produced by America’s best-known premium cable channel. Whether as Omar in The Wire, Montrose in Lovecraft Country, Freddy Knight in Richard Price & Steve Zaillian’s The Night Of (2016), or Chalky White in Terence Winter’s Boardwalk Empire (2010-2014), Williams rescued, almost singlehandedly, HBO’s vaunted original programming from what can charitably be called its inception as “whitebread” entertainment, especially after Darren Star’s Sex and the City (1998-2004) and David Chase’s The Sopranos (1999-2007) muscled Tom Fontana’s Oz (1997-2003)—HBO’s first original series, a prison drama more diverse in cast and crew than anything else made during the network’s earliest forays into scripted television—out of the cultural spotlight.

Williams is, or, rather, was (see how difficult it remains to believe that he’s passed?) not merely among the greatest American actors of his generation, but also a formidable presence wherever he went. This description should not suggest that MKW—as he’s affectionately known by his online fans—was fearsome in real life, although he played fearsome better than just about anybody else. Williams the actor was a master of understatement, of the wordless stare and the silent sneer and the quiet grin that communicates more than any line of dialogue possibly could.

“Oh indeed,” as Omar might say, Williams was terrific in every role he ever essayed. MKW was undoubtedly a strong personality both on and off screen, so it’s a fitting—if incomplete—epitaph to observe that Williams’s talent, commitment to his craft, and capacity for hard work transformed him into one of the most intelligent, honest, and empathetic artists working in any medium anywhere.

2. Actor, Actor!

That is high, but fully deserved, praise. No one who watches The Wire will ever forget Omar Little, the gay Baltimore stick-up man who robs drug dealers but refuses to hassle honest citizens, who ensures that his beloved grandmother gets to church each and every Sunday morning, and who strikes fear into his victims’ hearts by whistling “Farmer in the Dell” while carrying a loaded shotgun at his side.

The sight of Omar walking down West Baltimore’s streets wearing a leather duster, gun in hand and ready for all comers, causes people to yell, scream, or blurt “Omar’s comin’!” before they flee in terror because, yes indeed, Omar Little as played by Michael K. Williams is / was trouble. Big trouble, although Williams was not a particularly large man. Bad trouble, although Williams was never stereotypically histrionic or gruff. And, of course, terrific trouble, since Williams was, is, and always shall be fabulous in every scene, appearance, conversation, and showdown that The Wire offers him.

So indelibly linked to Williams were those words of warning that, when MKW appeared on the set of Spike Lee’s 2008 World War II drama Miracle at St. Anna for his first day of shooting, the impish Lee—a huge Wire fan whose movies (especially 1995’s Clockers) provide explicit inspiration for this series—screamed “Omar’s comin!’” to the assembled cast and crew. Williams, whom Lee had cast against type as a nervous soldier whose anxiety before battle departs markedly from Omar’s resolute approach to life, took this ribbing in the same good stride he did whenever people said those words to him—sometimes screaming them at him—on the street (no matter how irritating that little ritual must’ve become).

Yes, Michael K. Williams was a mensch. You’ll never hear stories about him being publicly rude to anyone (and you’ll never track down even one such anecdote) because, as far as I can tell, he was as fun, kind, and decent a person as we would all hope, which only confirms what his family, friends, and colleagues have said about Williams since he joined the ancestors. He was as good a person as he was an actor, which means he was a very good person indeed.

Yet, if you don’t trust my judgment about Williams’s acting talent, please consider taking the word of one of America’s best writers, the novelist and cultural critic Francine Prose.

Upon receiving Washington University in St. Louis’s International Humanities Medal in 2010 (bestowed by Wash U’s Center for the Humanities), Prose gave a stirring address titled “Ten Things Art Can Do for Us” in which she states, simply and memorably, “Art can be beautiful”3 before citing, in order, Hieronymus Bosch’s sixteenth-century triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, Paul Cézanne’s 1893-1894 painting Still Life with Apples, Mavis Gallant’s 1963 short story “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street,” Dezső Kosztolányi’s 1924 novel Skylark, Mike Leigh’s 1990 film Life Is Sweet, Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 film The Godfather, and “every moment of Michael K. Williams’s portrait of Omar Little in David Simon’s The Wire” as proof that, in addition to beauty, “Art can give us pleasure.”4

What can we say to this pronouncement? Only “yes indeed.”

Williams’s work in every role he played was both beautiful and pleasurable, as well as something equally valuable: insightful. He unveiled each character’s inner state so precisely that you’ll never mistake Omar Little for Montrose Freeman or Chalky White for Freddy Knight, just as you’ll never confuse Williams playing Bobby McCray (in Ava DuVernay’s exceptional 2019 Netflix docudrama When They See Us) with his performance as Leonard Pine (in Sundance TV’s 2016-2018 series Hap and Leonard, Nick Damici and Jim Mickle’s fun and funky adaptation of Joe R. Lansdale’s long-running novel-and-short-story series). Each man, in Williams’s hands and body and spirit, is memorable, singular, utterly distinct—in a word, unique.

How many actors can make this claim over the course of just two or three roles, much less an entire career? Too few, I would argue, but Michael K. Williams defied not only the odds but also the temptation to repeat himself. He never did, which is the best measure of his life’s work.

3. Artist, Artist!

For completists, I also recommend Williams’s VICE TV documentary series Black Market, which sees him (and various guest hosts) visiting illicit trading sites all over the world, along with his notable movie appearances in, among others, 2007’s Gone Baby Gone, 2013’s 12 Years a Slave, and 2019’s Motherless Brooklyn. The man has 109 Internet Movie Database (IMDb) acting credits to his name, so you can’t go wrong delving into his expansive and substantial onscreen life.

The year 2021 was a tough one for losing treasured cultural luminaries, far too many of them African American. The legendary Cicely Tyson passed in January 2021, the incomparable Paul Mooney left us in May 2021, Bob Moses and Gloria Richardson journeyed to the other side in July 2021, and now Michael K. Williams has shuffled off this mortal coil. That would be a terrible toll at any time, but it strikes even harder as the COVID-19 pandemic persists, meaning that, even more than usual, we need people of Williams’s caliber to help us through the gloom.

Such musings, however, are too downbeat for memorializing a person as vibrant, as admirable, and as energetic as Michael K. Williams. Although we must say farewell to this terrific artist and citizen, we needn’t say goodbye. He bequeaths us a body of work guaranteed to bring lasting pleasure. Although a tremendous actor has exited the stage, his art—just as beautiful as Francine Prose claims it to be—remains for us to enjoy, and, yes indeed, to relish.

Michael K. Williams left us much too soon, but he remains an unforgettable contributor to our national life and our cultural heritage.

May he rest in perfect peace.

NOTES