Deadwood why it ended

Trixie and Sol fell in love, as did Calamity Jane and Joanie. And while Bullock and Swearengen often butted heads, the real villain turned out to be George Hearst Gerald McRaney , a two-faced mining tycoon who arrived in Deadwood at the tail end of Season 2.

Just as slimy as he was well-spoken, his attempts to take over town were punctuated with several suspicious murders. He became furious with Alma, in particular, for refusing to sell Hearst her gold claim, and retaliated by murdering her husband, Ellsworth, and cutting off one of Al's fingers. All of this culminated with a furious Trixie going on the warpath and shooting the mustache-twirling villain. Unfortunately, the gunshot only wounded Hearst, and he demanded that the former sex worker be killed as payment.

Instead, Swearengen killed a woman named Jen, who looked similar to Trixie. They put her body in a coffin and presented it to the mining magnate, who didn't know any better. Hearst, meanwhile had successfully rigged the local elections, amassed most of the land in Deadwood, and consequently left town in the series finale, "Tell Him Something Pretty.

Those specials never materialized. Television is a numbers game. By and large, the shows that bring in the most overall viewers at least the ones in that advertiser-coveted age group are the ones that get a rubber-stamp renewal season after season. HBO is an ad-free network and operates on a paid subscription model, but it still has to take ratings into effect — if it airs shows that not enough people are watching, then it's a waste of the company's money. This was the problem with Deadwood.

Despite the critical praise and awards attention from the Emmys and Golden Globes, it never exactly pulled in Game of Thrones - style numbers. The first season of Deadwood averaged a respectable 4. A downward ratings trajectory makes an early cancellation inevitable. Every episode of Deadwood was densely packed with inscrutable characters and complicated dialogue.

Deadwood was already a difficult show to make, even before creator David Milch's tendency toward last-minute rewrites. Timothy Olyphant told the audience at Film Independent Presents' "An Evening with Deadwood " via IndieWire about the time Milch came to him in his trailer to tell him that he'd just decided to kill off Bullock's nephew Ian McShane remembers complete rewrites coming in so late that the pages still bore the warmth of the copy machine.

More takes means more money, and Deadwood wasn't a cheap show to begin with, on account of its ultra-realistic re-creation of 19th century Deadwood, South Dakota, and everything in it. It must have been hard for HBO to justify keeping Deadwood around when it didn't bring in huge ratings.

Long before the era of Peak TV brought high-quality content to most every cable network and streaming service, HBO held itself up as the home of prestige television. In the mids, the flavor of HBO was solidly hip, envelope-pushing shows set in the present day.

But among those shows about cranky TV writers, deluded actresses, cranky British actors, depressed mob bosses, and plural marriage sat Deadwood, an often brutal, slow-moving Western where the characters talked like they were doing Shakespeare when they weren't swearing.

Deadwood was an anomaly on HBO's schedule — it was simply too weird to live. Say what you will about the ill-mannered, potty-mouthed people of Deadwood, they had a knack for rising to the occasion when least expected. The series ended in exactly the wrong spot, with the camp brought low and complicit in the killing of an innocent in order to appease murderous millionaire George Hearst, played by the terrifying Gerald McRaney as a rapacious, drawling creature of unfettered capitalism.

You finish the show yearning for a redemption that was never able to be filmed. Until now. Our muddy mining town has flourished into a full-fledged mini-metropolis, complete with telephone poles studding the streets and buildings made of brick and stone.