David Milch’s HBO Western series “Deadwood” tells of a grimy mining town where drinking, whoring, killing, cussing and cheating are de rigueur. Illegally located on Sioux land ungoverned by U.S. law, its saloons and gambling dens seethe with debauchery — largely orchestrated by a Machiavellian pimp, Al Swearengen, whose language rivals Tony Soprano’s.
In an interview, Milch, 59, eschews expletives, although his grittily poetic speech resembles Swearengen’s, as does his fascination with vice. It’s an interest that dates as far back as his bar mitzvah, when this son of a Jewish surgeon learned a thing or two about sin.
“I studied with a cantor who was susceptible to being bribed,” he said with relish. “He was a great stamp collector, so I was able to get around some of the more stringent requirements.”
But something about the religion apparently stuck, because Milch added, “Judaism is predicated on an ethical and legal perspective, and I imbibed that.” Indeed, his TV work has obsessively focused on laws and lawlessness since he left his Yale English teaching post to write for the cop drama “Hill Street Blues” in 1982.
Milch, a creator of “NYPD Blue,” envisioned a more unusual police show in 2001 when he pitched the series that would become “Deadwood”: a cop drama set in ancient Rome. The HBO executive replied that the network already had a proposed Roman series, but would Milch like to try a Western? He quickly agreed.
“I realized the genre was perfect for exploring how laws emerge in a place where nothing is explicitly forbidden,” he said.
While poring through historical documents, Milch discovered that the real Deadwood, S.D., was perhaps the quintessential example of how order developed from the “primordial ooze of libertine anarchy.” He decided to set the series there, mixing fact and fiction with characters who’d flooded the area after gold was discovered there in 1875.
The show’s historical figures include Wild Bill Hickok (Keith Carradine), the crude Calamity Jane (Robin Weigert), hot-headed ex-marshal Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant) and his temperate Jewish partner, Sol Star (John Hawkes), who founded the town’s first hardware store.
During a year of meticulous research, Milch was interested to discover that Star, an immigrant from Bavaria, was elected to Deadwood’s first city council in 1876 and eventually served 10 terms as mayor.
Although only a couple hundred Jewish merchants lived among Deadwood’s estimated 5,000 inhabitants between 1876 and 1900, they owned more than one-third of downtown businesses, said Mary Kopco, director of the town’s Adams Museum & House. “They were such a stabilizing force,” added Kopco, who in 1999 curated an exhibit titled “An Unbroken Chain: Deadwood’s Jewish Legacy.”
“It was the Jewish community that really allowed Deadwood to survive.”
Their influence is literally carved in stone, as Milch discovered while wandering downtown Deadwood for inspiration. The name “Goldberg” is still engraved in the brick building that housed Jacob Goldberg’s grocery, where Calamity Jane once shopped. Harris Franklin (formerly Finkelstein), an ex-peddler, liquor distributor and cattle baron, hired a synagogue architect to design his 1892 Queen Anne Victorian, now the Adams House.
A grander Victorian structure, the Bullock Hotel, stands on the site of the former hardware store, Star and Bullock, Auctioneers and Commission Merchants.
The store’s well-liked co-founder, Star, was born in Bavaria in 1840 and immigrated to the United States at age 10. He settled with relatives in Ohio, moved to Montana following the Civil War and met Bullock, with whom he traveled to Deadwood via a wagon loaded with hardware in 1876. Their goal was “to mine the miners,” said actor Hawkes, who read numerous books on Judaism and pioneer Jews to portray Star.
There was one catch, however: “I’m not Jewish,” Hawkes frankly told Milch upon their first meeting two years ago. “David asked me, ‘Have you ever felt shame or sadness or ostracized?’ I said, ‘Every day.’ And David said, ‘Then you’re Jewish.'”
New episodes of “Deadwood” begin Sunday, March 6, on HBO.