Like so many of us in the “shows featuring Timothy Olyphant as an angry person with hats and really low-riding jeans” demographic, I love Deadwood. I love its harsh and beautiful language, its complicated female characters, its gut-punching violence, and its Olyphant. Launched in 2004, it features not only T.O. at his sexiest, but the inimitable John Hawkes, Ian McShane, and Robin Weigert. It’s the story of how a 1870s South Dakotan mining camp became a town, but it’s really the story of the dirty and horrible and yet weirdly compelling American West.
When Deadwood first aired, my dad and I decided to watch it together. We devoured every episode—along with the special snacks he bought to entice me to leave my post-college apartment—straight through the season two finale where Calamity Jane gets new boots to wear to a boy’s funeral. But that’s as far as we got.
***
My dad divorced my mom when I was 13 and had a new wife before my 15th birthday, and to make a very long story short, it drove a decade-long wedge between us. We saw each other often, but we didn’t know how to connect. He tried to make up for this by taking my younger brother and I to Old Navy and letting us stay up late eating junk food. He got MTV so we could watch Loveline after he and his new wife went to bed and bought us our very own phone so friends could call us during the every-other-weekend we spent at his place. To make another very long story short, his attempts to replace our nuclear family with Pop Tarts and Adam Corolla didn’t work.
But what did work, what brought us together like no cheaply-made sweater dress could, was Netflix. Though now we take 24-hour access to every TV show out there for granted, in 2005 it was incredibly exciting, especially for a recent college grad like me who couldn’t afford cable. Instant streaming was but a mere glint in technology’s eye, and even owning a DVD player was a luxury beyond most of my friends’ means. My dad seized this opportunity to get me to hang out with him like Joanie Stubbs seizes a business opportunity; he got a Netflix subscription and a queue a mile long with HBO shows I wanted to watch.
Dad and I went from strained coffee dates to Saturdays spent watching Al Swearengen shout “cocksucker” with reckless abandon. Not only did Deadwood give us a chance to be together without having to talk, it gave us something to talk ABOUT between episodes. An HBO show about gold mining and murder reconnected us when nothing else could.
A quick aside: This is why I hate it when someone says they “don’t watch television,” as if television were a gun loaded with cocaine and rabies. Under the right circumstances, good TV creates bonds between people and lets us share experiences safely, staring forward at a screen to access truths about our lives. Nothing else does this like TV can. And you can eat snacks while it’s happening.
During our “Netflix Saturdays” period, Dad would email me on Friday to ask what groceries I wanted. When I got to his house the next morning he’d make us Morningstar Farms vegetarian sausage patties and scrambled eggs to fuel our TV bingefest. As morning turned into afternoon and Cy Tolliver’s Deadwood empire expanded and collapsed, we’d drink Wild Turkey with Diet Coke and shell peanuts, forging the wild frontier of the adult father-daughter relationship.
Through the magic of television, we were reacquainted. We learned about each other’s lives—our real lives, not our roles as “Father” and “Daughter of Father”—while learning about each other’s favorite Deadwood characters. Like his beloved Cy Tolliver, my dad’s life hadn’t turned out quite the way he wanted. While we watched Tolliver fight gritty turf wars on the South Dakota streets, Dad confessed to me that his second marriage wasn’t working and he regretted divorcing my mom. While my own favorite character, Jane, drank and swore and struggled to overcome her demons, I told my dad how scared I was to be done with college and how I didn’t know what should come next.
It sounds like a stretch to say Netflix saved our relationship, but I’ll say it because that’s what happened.
***
My dad died suddenly, between the Deadwood series finale and its DVD release in 2007. I woke one morning to my phone ringing to tell me he was gone. He died at home, down the hall from the couch we’d sat on every Saturday, eating egg whites and watching Netflix while we figured out what came next.
Dad and I were also in the middle of Big Love and Dexter when he died, and I continued watching them, alone. I cried my eyes out after the Big Love series finale because my dad would never find out how it ended (not so the Dexter finale, because that show became unwatchable after season five.) But I’ve never seen another episode of Deadwood.
I’ve read that the series ended abruptly. Everyone thought there’d be more episodes—that they’d have one more season—but there just weren’t. Season three faded to black and that was it. No resolution, no chance for fans to say goodbye to the rasping frontier town full of flawed characters they’d grown to love so much. I can relate.
It’s been six years since I’ve seen Deadwood or my dad. I now live with someone who owns the series on DVD and has suggested we watch it together, but I always say no. I look at the box for season three all the time, but I need it to stay unwatched more than I want to find out what happened.
As long as Deadwood never ends for me, Dad and I are still just in between seasons. I know there’ll never be another “Netflix Saturday,” but this way at least I’ll never see an episode of Deadwood without him.
You should watch it though; it really is a great show.
Tags: dads, deadwood, kelsey wallace, loss, television
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I like everything about this–the Morningstar Farms veggie sausage, the luminous Calamity Jane and Joanie Stubbs, and the unwatched episodes as an anodyne for loss.
Just, oh, wow. This was great.
I know what you mean. I am crying, I love you, and I know what you mean.
This is beautifully sad, and more pertinent than I thought it was going to be. I also lost my dad just after reconnecting with him – he came to the UK once after a 20-year gap in which he’d lived abroad and been unable to come back, and then he died a few months later while we were planning our next visits.
This was beautiful.
This was so good, Kelsey. An honest, poignant portrait of your relationship with your dad, and an articulate explanation of what TV can mean for us, and does mean for me. Loved it.
I can’t come up with anything pithy or witty in response. Just thank you, and now I need to go blow my nose.
Oh. Oh oh oh. This is WONDERFUL. I am also awash a sea of tissues now.
Love.
Great read and while my relationship with my father doesn’t include a rift of any sort we do bond over shared tv shows quite frequently, so I get it. And, I’m still shockingly upset that they ended Deadwood when they did – totally and completely uncalled for!
Baaaah. After coming off a year in which my mom died unexpectedly, and a very rough Christmas with my father… this got me right in the feels. Phew. Thanks for sharing your story, Kelsey.
This is really beautiful. I especially love the thoughts about how TV can be so much more than just staring at people on a screen. I get really annoyed when people dismiss all of television as mindless garbage, because it’s not! (Some of it can be. But lots of it is great for many reasons.)
raining on my face raining on my face raining on my face
I love all of my writers equally, but this was one of my very favourite pieces of all time.
Seeing as how I consider The Toast to be the ultimate in everything I care about online, I couldn’t appreciate this compliment more. Thank you so much Nicole!
I love this whole post, and I especially love this:
This is why I hate it when someone says they “don’t watch television,” as if television were a gun loaded with cocaine and rabies. Under the right circumstances, good TV creates bonds between people and lets us share experiences safely, staring forward at a screen to access truths about our lives. Nothing else does this like TV can. And you can eat snacks while it’s happening.
Yes. Exactly. This has happened to us. Repeatedly. Not with Deadwood specifically, but never mind.
I believe this SO STRONGLY. Watching our illicitly-downloaded Sherlock last night with no allowed bathroom breaks was serious grade-A marital bonding time. (Save any Sherlock reactions for tomorrow!)
Hmm, the prearranged “no bathroom breaks” protocol seems worthy of further study…
I lost my mom at the end of 2012, and she had season tickets to the symphony. I used her remaining tickets for the season and cry during every show because I knew how much she would have loved the performance. Because of that, I also learned not to watch Pioneer Woman because she loved her show just as much.
Grief sucks, y’all.
Jesus, I was doing okay with this till the very end and then the crumpled cry-face took over. I live on the other side of the country from the people I’ve lost in the last few years, and the whole idea that as long as I don’t do X, they’re still somehow there, is painfully familiar.
This touches me in a way I didn’t know was possible. Maybe because my dad and I bond over TV, too. Not as much as my mother and I do, but still, my heart.
This touches me in a way I didn't know was possible. Maybe because my dad and I bond over TV, too. Not as much as my mother and I do, but still, my heart.
The last line just kills me. It’s that way in which we try to cycle things back around, make them okay and end with a smile. Bravery maybe? Great piece all around, and I am so sorry for your loss.
Kelsey, I’m sorry for your loss, which you articulated beautifully. My dad and I? Homer and Lisa Simpson, in more ways than I can count. And my mom died midway through Sue Grafton’s alphabet mysteries, which I keep reading…but I don’t know what will happen when Z comes around.
Kelsey, I'm sorry for your loss, which you articulated beautifully. My dad and I? Homer and Lisa Simpson, in more ways than I can count. And my mom died midway through Sue Grafton's alphabet mysteries, which I keep reading…but I don't know what will happen when Z comes around.
I am back online after getting stuck in Chicago without my laptop for a few days and I just wanted to say THANK YOU to all of you for your kind words and feedback on this piece. Really, it means so much. THANKSTHANKSTHANKS