1. Harriet Tubman: The Underground Railroad is one of the coolest things to happen in American history, and it’s only part of what makes Harriet Tubman awesome. Tubman made 13 runs on the Underground Railroad, an act of outrageous courage given the fate that would have awaited her as a conductor were she ever caught. She was the first woman to head up a Union military expedition—which involved guiding ships past a river Confederate forces had mined—during which she helped free more than 700 slaves. And she did all of this despite having seizures and headaches. And it might be fun to see Viola Davis cut loose a little bit post The Help, or to see C.C.H. Pounder deploy her glorious steeliness on an iconic portrayal of Tubman.

2. Ida Tarbell, Ida Wells and Nellie Bly: I’m a sucker for movies about journalists, and these three women are best in class. From Tarbell’s investigation of Standard Oil, which set the standard for document-based investigative journalism going forward; to Wells’ reporting on lynching in America; to Bly’s expose of the state of mental health treatment for the poor, all three were absolutely fearless, telling stories about bureaucracies and norms and prompting reform or efforts at reform. Too often, journalism movies and television shows have to gin up absolutely ridiculous plots to up the stakes—sorry, State of Play, I love you, but it’s true. But sometimes journalists go where the government won’t, even within our own country, at considerable risk to themselves. All three roles would be juicy, but I’d particularly like to see Kerry Washington, so wonderful in The Last King of Scotland, play Wells, who was just a few years younger than Washington is now when she gave her seminal speech on lynching.

3. William Howe and Abraham Hummel: Want a great portrait of Gilded Age New York? And a biopic that could actually be a fantastic dark comedy? A dual biopic of these notorious New York lawyers who represented everyone from free love advocate Victoria Woodhull (side note: the Henry Ward Beecher adultery trial would also make a great movie) to notorious New York gang leader John Dolan, they were themselves somewhat shady figures who represented both the worst excesses and some of the most progressive impulses of the era. Ian McShane would kill as William Howe.

4. Frank Kameny and Bayard Rustin: Harvey Milk was an undeniably key figure, and a martyr to the cause of gay rights. But even if you don’t get to end their stories with an assassination as a high point, Kameny and Rustin lived big, forceful lives, often under difficult circumstances. Kameny was fired by the Army for being gay, but bucked tradition by refusing to go quietly. He became a leader in the Mattachine Society (a pet subject for me) and lived to see the federal government apologize to him, a tremendously moving occasion—I was lucky enough to be there to see it. Rustin learned non-violent resistance in India with Gandhi—he was regularly arrested both there and in Africa—but in his own country, his colleagues in the Civil Rights movement kept him behind the scenes because he was gay.

5. Leland Stanford: Not all subjects of biopics need to be heroes, something that’s forgotten all too often. Stanford fanned anti-Chinese sentiment in California even as he imported Chinese workers to labor on construction of his railroads, a story currently getting ignored in AMC’s Hell on Wheels, and his career as a robber baron and politician illustrate the dangers of an overly-cozy relationship between business and government. Plus, we’d get a scene of the dude rowing to his own inauguration as Governor of California through a natural disaster. Ron Swanson would be proud.

6. Lyndon Baines Johnson: Tragic, complex, abusive, and funny, Johnson may be the president since Teddy Roosevelt who would make the most intriguing biopic subject. I have no idea who would play him, but a movie about his decision not to run for reelection would make for a fascinating snapshot, as would a movie about him immediately in the wake of Kennedy’s assasination, though neither would fully reckon with his full domestic and international legacy.

The minister who’s set himself up in Hell on Wheels is a straightforward prairie minister (though one with a dark secret that ultimately reinforces the show’s sympathy for former slave-owners and advocates of slavery), rather than the tormented Union civil war veteran who ministered to Deadwood in its first season before succumbing to the brain tumor that was robbing him of his faith. And when the Hell on Wheels minister mildly asks “Haven’t we had our fill of war? Our fill of killing?” it’s no match for the anguished cries of Deadwood’s camp doctor raging at God: “What conceivable use was the screaming of those men? Did you need to hear them to know your omnipotence?”

Hell on Wheels doesn’t compete with Deadwood in the arts of cussing or whoring, either. Declaring of the Emancipation Proclamation, as Elam Ferguson does at one point, that “Ain’t nothing good coming from this either…Look what this got. I might as well wipe my ass with it,” or the sight of Doc Durant denouncing his own pitch to investors as “Twaddle and shite,” don’t remotely compare to Swearengen promising a crowd fired up by rumors of a massacre by Native Americans “I will offer a personal $50 bounty for every decapitated head of as many of these godless heathen cocksuckers as anyone can bring in. And God rest the souls of that poor family. And pussy’s half price, next 15 minutes.” Hell on Wheels’ prostitutes are hookers with hearts of gold—and in one case, tattoos from her time in Indian captivity—rather than full-fledged citizens in this rough new society, and their interactions with men are entirely predictable.

The one thing that Hell on Wheels has on Deadwood is the sight of Common in a jaunty hat, though of course that doesn’t make up for the show’s Confederate nostalgia. There’s a really interesting story to be told about the black experience in Westward expansion, or about the railroad and Manifest Destiny from the perspective of the Native Americans who are being displaced by it. But this isn’t it. Also, this is a reminder that I need to finish blogging Deadwood. That starts again tomorrow.

The Disney summary of the plot suggests he’s mustered out of an unnamed military conflict, and I wonder if they just might leave it vague. There’s obviously a strong connection between the Civil War and Westerns — the frontier gives folks a chance to refight lost wars. And while it could be convenient, from a plot perspective, to explain that a human who has ended up on a strange planet would be good at organizing an alien insurgency because he developed his skills in a specific, analogous conflict. But it’s probably better to make it almost any other conflict than the Civil War. The Confederacy doesn’t get retroactive points just because fighting in it helps someone achieve justice for another species down the road.