I’ve written before that I tried Mad Men and just couldn’t get into it, turned off, I think, by the characters themselves and their distance from what have always seemed to me to be a vital part of the ’60s. I will catch up before the next season starts in deference to all you good people (Though can anyone promise me that the show feels less claustrophobic as it goes on? You can use this post as an open thread to try to buck me up.), but I’ll admit I’ve been eager for alternatives, for shows that will take the gorgeous looks and desperateness to break out of old roles of that particular moment, and do something I’m more engaged by with them.

Which may be why I’m so mad for The Hour, which premieres on BBC America at 10 tonight: it’s set in a newsroom, which I’m a total sucker for; features Dominic West back in high seducer mode and ready to throw down with Jon Hamm; and is explicitly engaged with gender and class (and sometimes race) for almost every moment of the show without being boring or pedantic about it about it. As I write in my review for The Atlantic:

The setting helps tremendously in highlighting these issues. In an early broadcast, anchor Hector Madden (The Wire’s Dominic West, in his triumphant return to television) flubs the framing of an investigative piece the up-jumped working-class reporter Freddie Lyon (Ben Whishaw) did about the difficulty West Indian immigrants have finding housing in London: He ends the segment with a depressing reaffirmation that in London “If you’re white, you’re alright.” The cast may be all-white, but they’re aware of the problems of people who don’t share their country of origin or skin tone. Later, their producer, Bel Rowley (an unexpectedly tremendous Romola Garai), kills an interview Lyon gets with a grieving Cabinet minister about a bill to abolish hanging in favor of a live interview Madden does with the Egyptian ambassador to the U.K. after Egypt seizes control of the Suez Canal, while Lyon begins an investigation into the mysterious death of an academic. The compromises Bel has to make are real, and not just because the stories have real impacts. Because the BBC operated under a Royal Charter, and because in 1956, the network was a year into its competition with the newly-created independent competitor ITV, the approval of high government officials wasn’t an immaterial concern, and Bel is doubly under pressure as a woman producer.

There’s a real virtue to the fact that the story begins with Bel in a position of power, rather than simply charting her upward trajectory. She can stumble as well as rise, at one point lecturing the show’s secretary not to do little extras for the men on the show because “do you want to be taken seriously? Or forever be some stupid little marionette forever fluttering on the arm of every good-looking man in the BBC? First rule, don’t make tea.” While she has a male mentor in the BBC director of news, Bel has decision-making authority over Hector and Freddie, an old friend with whom she’s long plotted a new kind of television show, only to beat him to the job of producer while he’s stuck covering domestic news. “They’re humoring you,” Freddie lashes out at Bel when he finds out she’s got the job. “They don’t want a woman. A woman is difficult, hysterical. And you can never really find one who’ll ever stay. Another couple of years and you’ll probably want a baby.” He doesn’t actually believe any of it, but that doesn’t mean he won’t use her insecurities to hurt her.

I think there are some problems with the show, most notably the espionage subplot, which The Hour doesn’t actually need for extra gravity. But the acting is so good, top-to-bottom, and the show’s got some of that Deadwood Shakespearean air, a sense in the dialogue that you’re in a profoundly different place. This is politics as drama done beautifully.

One of the things that’s fascinating about this embryonic society in Deadwood is the way that class works in multiple directions. Brom Garret’s wealth and pretensions labeled him a tenderfoot and a potential victim, someone whose rigidities about honor and general impracticality were laughable rather than honorable. His widow, Alma, has some of the weaknesses, and in these couple of episodes, we see her overcome them as she shakes off both laudanum and the restrictions she’s placed on herself in the name of propriety. “I had better manners before I began to abstain,” she tells Bullock. But as she defies expectations, she also begins to gain admirers in the camp for sticking it out. “I’d have bet a month’s wages that burial would be taking place in New York City,” Jane says of Alma. “That is, if I had a fucking paying job.”

That doesn’t mean she doesn’t make errors — Alma’s not entirely a frontier woman yet. When she offers to send Trixie to New York City with a recommendation that would get her work as long as she’ll take care of Flora, Alma misunderstands how vulnerable that prospect makes Trixie feel. “I got no people anywhere,” Trixie snaps at her. “What the fuck? What would keep you here? Do you want to fuck this man? Then fuck him…I know my place, you rich cunt. And I’m going back to it.” Despite that toughness, Trixie’s got her own kind of vulnerability. She may be able to tell Al why she’s helped Alma get clean even as he’s sexually assaulting her: “Her being high wasn’t going to have nothing to do with whether she sold you the claim. And she wanted to get off the dope. And that little one needs someone to care for her, and maybe get her the fuck out of here, and I knew it wasn’t going to be me.” But she still tries to overdose, telling Alma, who’s apologizing for her emotional distress that “I don’t remember you being the one who made me a whore Mrs. Garret.” Life for women in Deadwood is a constant negotiation between the kind of sensitivity that can induce Sofia Metz to speak her own name for the first time and the kind of fortitude that will let you stand up to both of your employers and survives.
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One of the reasons I think that there’s a case to be made that Deadwood is superior to the other television shows in its class is how committed it is to exploring the various ways that women fight for their self-determination. In The Wire, we have Kima and Snoop, but they’re fairly similar in their gender expression and the amount of status they hold in the organizations of which they’re a part. In Mad Men, the main female characters are fairly tight variations on a theme, our three graces being a non-working housewife, a wife in a low-status, gender-bounded job, and an unmarried woman pushing the boundaries of what jobs are appropriate for women. Skylar and Marie are tightly-wound opposite faces on a coin in Breaking Bad. Carmela Soprano is a fantastic, richly textured character, but her circumstances are not precisely relatable. None of this is to say that these other women are not important, and sometimes immortal, creations, but none of these shows have as broad a conception of womanhood as Deadwood.

The show’s done a beautiful job of bringing together three of its female main characters together in protection of Sofia Metz, the one survivor of the raid by road agents. Jane is her initial, rough-hewn protector, who may be a drunk, and drunker than usual due to Bill’s death, but is together enough to leave Sofia with Alma, who may be a laudanum addict, but at least has her own room rented up for the time being. And Trixie, who until now we’ve mostly seen as a victim of violence at her johns’ hands or at Al’s, joins Alma initially as part of Bill’s scheme, but decides to help Alma get clean and to take care of Sofia. The ties of gender and addiction are stronger than fear. “First I was afraid I was going to die,” she tells Alma about her withdrawal. “And then I was afraid I wouldn’t. And then one day I woke up free.”
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One of the biggest challenges of a show or movie that depicts real historical figures is managing the space between the audience’s understanding of who those people were and how the other characters see those historical figures in their context. Thus far, one of the reasons Deadwood feels as powerful to me as it does is because of the way it deals with the myth and death of Wild Bill Hickock. There are characters like Calamity Jane and Alma Garret, who are at least partially bought into the idea of Hickock as a hero. “I don’t know if you ever should learn English,” Jane tells Sofia Metz, around whom she’s trying, and failing, to avoid cursing around. “But then I couldn’t tell you about Bill sleeping in the hallway out of thought for others.” Bill’s able to pull himself together around people who don’t, or can’t, or refuse to see the cracks in him, tickling Sofia, commissioning Seth Bullock to stand in his place to help Alma.

Then, there are people who see the gap between the myth of Wild Bill and the reality of the self-destructive man, like Charlie Utter, and they are those it’s most uncomfortable for Bill to be around. “I’m doing what I want to do,” Bill tells Charlie in one of the most touching scenes in the series so far. “Some goddamn time a man’s due to stop arguing with himself. Feeling he’s twice the goddamn fool he knows he is because can’t be something he tries to be every goddamn day without once getting to dinnertime without fucking it up. I don’t want to fight it no more. And I don’t want you pissing in my ear about it. Can you let me go to hell the way I want to?”

And then there’s the person that Wild Bill seems to be most comfortable with in Deadwood, Seth Bullock, a man of action, someone who isn’t disappointed by Bill’s failure to be a legend and is happy to see him as a man. That Wild Bill will ride out to see what happened to the Metz family, that he’ll shoot a road agent, that he’ll help with construction, seems to be enough for Bullock. And Bullock’s the one person who is seen by Wild Bill as much as Bullock sees him — Wild Bill sees before Sol, or anyone else, does that Bullock isn’t going to be happy running a hardware store. “Pretty quick you’ll have laws here and every other damn thing,” Bill muses when he finds Seth hammering frame beams together in a fit of insomnia. “I’ll settle for property rights,” Seth tells him, only to have Bill respond with a skeptical “Will you?”
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There are a lot of television shows that I haven’t seen, but not many of them are about the rise of law and capitalism from the muck of anarchy, with a lot of race, class, and gender politics thrown in. I’ll be blogging my way through Deadwood two episodes at a time on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Dust off your DVDs or ready your HBOGO logins, and let’s rock and roll.

There’s a common assumption among minor Deadwood characters that the absence of the law and governance augurs a capitalist paradise in the town they hope to settle. “Jesus Christ Almighty,” Clell Watson says from his cell, trying to talk Seth Bullock into letting him out of jail and on his way. “No law at all, gold you could scoop from the streams with your bare hands, and I got to go fuck myself up by supposedly stealing Byron Sampson’s horse.” Similarly, Ellsworth, celebrating his latest strike in the Gem Saloon declares that “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-dicked cocksuckers passing themselves off as prospectors better try to stop me.”

Al Swearengen’s central insight seems to be that it’s a false distinction, that a little regulation and law and order can in fact make it easier to do business. “If that longhaired loudmouth had held his end up, we could be operating here in peace,” he grumbles of Custer at one point. And when he finds out in “Deep Water” that road agents, rather than Indians, appear to have killed the Metz family on the Spearfish road, Al is furious at Ned Mason’s companion, telling him “So you let Ned run, you leave a squarehead alive, and me to clean up. Those are the only loose ends.” There’s no question that Al is a violent man, but in these first two episodes, most of his violent acts, whether he’s beating Trixie as punishment for murdering a customer in self-defense, or stabbing one of the murderous road agents, is a way of preserving the order that he needs to operate his business successfully. He’s not alone in desiring some sort of return to the protection of the state. “We who have pursued our destiny outside law or statute will be restored to the bosom of the nation,” declares a drunken A.W. Merrick. “And…that’s what I believe!”
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Robert Lloyd has a provocative essay about the increasing dullness of prestige television’s anti-heroes up in the L.A. Times that I largely agree with:

We are not yet out of the age of “The Sopranos,” which, when it muscled in on the cultural conversation back at the end of the 20th century, made darkness and dysfunction the norm, first for premium cable, then basic cable and broadcast TV: “Nip/Tuck,” “Rescue Me,” “Deadwood,” “The Shield,” “The Tudors,” “The Borgias,” “Damages,” “Sons of Anarchy,” “Weeds,” “Dexter,” “Californication,” “Mad Men,” “Boardwalk Empire” and “House” are, to varying degrees, its progeny. Many have been among the best things on television. But as much as I love Hugh Laurie, I am over the hopeless Gregory House; his ups and inevitable season-ending downs feel more contrived with every passing year, tricks to make a static character look dynamic.

In the same way, though Tony Soprano began as a person in apparent flux, long before the tardy end of “Sopranos” it was clear that the character was fatally fixed…Gilligan has smartly declared next season the last for “Breaking Bad,” but part of me — the part invested in the narrative, not quite paradoxically — wants Walt stopped now, not so much for the payback but to stop the insanity. No one he knows is better off for knowing him. The show belongs to Jesse now, who, though he has much to answer for himself, remains redeemable; he is quietly haunted where Walt is loudly self-justifying. Jesse is an antihero, too, but one with room to grow.

It seems important for shows to consider why a character ought to be an anti-hero. As I’ve written before, something like The Sopranos felt as fresh as it did when it came out because it let audiences test their sense of their own moral sophistication against the challenge of sympathizing with a sociopath in his struggles to commit more effective murders, to run a more efficient crime syndicate, to surmount the challenges of family life. But twelve years after the premiere of The Sopranos, that’s no longer a new proposition, and our collective ability to emotionally invest in very bad people is extremely well-established. And once we’ve proved that, character stasis becomes more important, and more frustrating, for audiences.

That’s not to say that there can’t be power in stasis. Characters who try to change, and fail, like Stringer Bell, can be as fascinating as characters who undergo long-lasting and hard-won transformations. But if you’re going to create an anti-hero, reveling in making badness compelling is probably no longer enough to produce an immortal show.

The Wire stands above other cable shows that rely on bad men as their main characters because their anti-heroes all have very specific roles. Stringer Bell’s experiences show the intractability of institutions in two directions, the inability of the drug trade to become truly efficient, and the labyrinthine nature of government regulation, which makes it easy to shut out new entrants and presents opportunities for corruption. Frank Sobotka can’t grow because he embodies a defeated institution that’s out of chances to evolve and survive—his death is the catalyst for his union’s death, and they go down together in the darkness. For a while on House, House’s irascibility was a useful illustration of the equally intransigent and uncaring approach to healthcare practiced by the hospital’s administrators, though now it’s mostly just an excuse for increasingly baroque darkness. The Tudors, which I think is not necessarily a good show, though it does have some good things in it, is an illustration of what happens when an anti-hero doesn’t have to chafe against the restrictions of society because he has dominion over them. I’m only a couple of episodes into Deadwood, about which much more to come, but Al Swearengen strikes me as an embodiment of pure capitalism that may not change over time, even as it manifests itself differently.

All of these shows have specific uses for their anti-heroes beyond the sheer, savage pleasure of watching people we like behave badly and get away with it. Not all anti-hero shows have to use those characters to illustrate social or institutional problems—Breaking Bad works despite the fact that I’m still now sure how the show’s creators feel about the Drug Enforcement Agency, something I intend to write about later in the week. But I do think that social analysis is often a good match for anti-heroics. The world’s not composed of saints and angels, and saints and angels may not be the people who see the world with the greatest clarity.