Gratifyingly, the reviews have been overwhelmingly positive.
#DEADWOOD SEASON 3 FINALE MOVIE#
The one thing that hadn’t changed in the intervening 13 years, however, was the public clamour for one last season that would give the series and its rich cast of characters the proper ending they deserved.įinally, in the small hours of Saturday morning, after years of rumours and false starts, viewers in Ireland, Britain and the United States got their longed-for bit of closure with Deadwood: The Movie (although the on-screen title was just plain Deadwood), set in 1889, 10 years after the events of season three, just as South Dakota is about to enter the Union as the 40th state.
By the end, it was attracting just 2.4 million viewers.ĭeadwood was ultimately felled by a combination of low viewing figures, high production costs and corporate squabbling over money between HBO and co-producer Paramount. Its peak audience in the US for the first season was 4.5 million. Ratings were never Deadwood’s strongest point. Then again, Game of Thrones had a huge following and sky-high ratings. Game of Thrones proved that the traditional one-episode-a-week way of doing things hadn’t been totally obliterated by streaming. The way television is packaged, presented and watched has been radically altered by the rise of Netflix, which created, for better or worse, the culture of binge-watching by making all episodes of a series available at the same time.
#DEADWOOD SEASON 3 FINALE TV#
Put it this way: the top-rated drama series on US TV that year was CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, which looks terribly old-fashioned and episodic by modern standards. In television, it’s something close to an eternity.Īn awful lot about the medium has changed since 2006, when Deadwood was unceremoniously cancelled by HBO after three seasons, during which David Milch’s magnificent series subverted and reinvented the Western. Thirteen years is a considerable amount of time in the average human life.