Hoopleheads! Cocksuckers!

Could the second season of Deadwood get any better? Any richer? Could it be written any better?

Also, could it be any more confusing?

**spoilers inevitably follow**

Season Two takes a few unlikely turns right off the bat: Swearengen is struck with a debilitating illness, meaning that his brilliant oratory is subtracted from the show for a few episodes; the sniveling, scheming, flat-voiced E.B. Farnham takes an almost central role for a couple of shows, and the character takes a new depth without lessening his overall repulsiveness; strangest of all, the actor who played Jack McCall (Wild Bill Hickok's assassin) returns in the role of Francis Wolcott, an eloquent psychopath who works for the Hearst organization. Why the same actor? I can't imagine that HBO was just too cheap; Garrett Dillahunt, the actor, is fantastic as Wolcott - every line that comes out of his mouth is delivered with a singular mixture of repression, cruelty, and sorrow.

I won't even get into where the show's famous coarseness takes you in the second season; there are some awful things depicted, as always. Season One seemed to be focused on taking some awful characters and building audience sympathy with them; Season Two sets out destroying that sympathy right away. The removal of Swearengen ratchets down the humor quotient for a couple of episodes; Jane, who is hilariously drunk during Season One, is just depressing for the first half of Season Two. It's like the writers wanted to take the most entertaining parts of the first season and make them go sour in your mouth...pretty bold, overall, and I think in a lot of ways it pays off.

Overall, I'm just amazed at the depth of vision David Milch and the rest of the creative team puts into Deadwood. The overall message of the show - that the birth pangs of a society come with violence, an overall lack of moral clarity, and lots of cussin' - is remarkably consistent, and it's one of the few times that TV shows have really bothered to ask what's essentially human (or humane, if you will) and what traits belong to the thin veneer of civilization.