busker

Now for the real stuff: Frank Rich writes of the Greatest Dirty Joke Ever Told and Senate Commerce Committee chairman Ted Stevens' intolerance of bad language on cable and satellite television. That's you, messrs MTV, Comedy Central, satellite purveyors of Howard Stern and countless others.

Quoth Rich:

If you can see only one of the shows that he wants to banish or launder, let me recommend the series that probably has more four-letter words, with or without participles, than any in TV history.

That would be "Deadwood" on HBO.

Its linguistic gait befits its chapter of American history, the story of a gold-rush mining camp in the Dakota Territory of the late 1870's.

"Deadwood" is the back story of a joke like "The Aristocrats" and of everything else that is joyously vulgar in American culture and that our new Puritans want to stamp out. It's the ur-text of Vegas and hip-hop and pulp fiction. It captures with Boschian relish what freedom, by turns cruel and comic and exhilarating, looked and sounded like at full throttle in frontier America before anyone got around to building churches or a government.

Next plug is via the excellent Sedition's web where he nails Why the show is so good

"The reason why it is so much better than the rest is that it has a moral center. It has a good guy. This became passé somewhere in the post-1950s world. It’s not irrelevant though. Anyone who looks objectively at the American political scene, the rampant corporate corruption in the world, or the atrocities in the Middle East for one second knows that when western culture made the assumption that good guys were no longer relevant, it signed its own death warrant.

If you’re an adult, watch this show. The 2nd season starts Sunday night, 6 March 2005. Don’t let this show disappear. Don’t even give them a reason to consider cutting its budget."

(Actually, from my very first glimpse of the fierce-eyed Seth Bullock, I was strongly reminded throughout of the equally moral Sedition.)

Indeed, had Timothy Olyphant come a cropper during filming, the Lion of the Nightcrew could have replaced him in a trice with the merest of tonsorial tweaking.