[quote]Duke wrote:
Now, speaking of westerns, A friend lent me the first season of Deadwood.
I hadn’t heard of it before but thought I’d give it a viewing.
a few comments -
The level of swearing is WAY over the top. Swearing doesn’t bother me in the slightest, but this thing is so full of swearing it detracts from the storyline IMO. It’s like they’re trying to hard to be badass - not a fan in that regard.
I like the story so far and I’ll stick with it and move on to the second season, but that swear button needs to be turned down, way down, to make it more credible I reckon.[/quote]
Here’s some information about the swearing in Deadwood from wiki:
[i]"Use of profanity
From its debut Deadwood has drawn attention for its use of extremely explicit, modern profanity, especially among the more coarse characters. It is a deliberate anachronism on the part of the creator with a twofold intent. As Milch has explained in several interviews and on the DVD commentary tracks, originally the characters were to use period slang and swear words. Such words, however, were based heavily on the era’s deep religious roots and tended to be more blasphemous than scatological. Instead of being shockingly crude (in keeping with the tone of a frontier mining camp), the results sounded downright comical. As one commentator puts it “�?� if you put words like “goldarn” into the mouths of the characters on “Deadwood,” they’d all wind up sounding like Yosemite Sam.”.[6]
Instead, it was decided the show would use current profanity in order for the words to have the same impact on modern audiences as the blasphemous ones did back in the 1870s. In fact, in early episodes, the character of Mr. Wu seems to know only three words of English �?? the mangled name of one character (“Swedgin”), “San Francisco”, and his favorite derogatory term for those he dislikes, “cocksucka”.
The other intent in regards to the frequency of the swearing was to signal to the audience the lawlessness of the camp in much the same way that the original inhabitants used it to show they were very self-aware of the fact they were living outside the bounds of “civil society.”
The issue of the authenticity of Deadwood’s dialogue has even been alluded to in the show itself. Early in the second season, after E.B. Farnum has fleeced Mr. Wolcott of $10,000, Farnum tries to console the geologist:
EB: Some ancient Italian maxim fits our situation, whose particulars escape me.
Wolcott: Is the gist that I�??m shit outta luck?
EB: Did they speak that way then?[3]
The word “fuck” was said 43 times in the first hour of the show (as reported by MTV Canada, 2006).[citation needed] It has also been reported that the series had a total count of “fucks” of 2980, and a cumulative FPM[7] of 1.56.[8]"[/i]
