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Every time a show you love gets canceled, it hurts.
The show even had an internal okay to start production on season four when the axe fell.
Excerpt from ‘The Deadwood Bible’
Deadwooddied on a Friday.
The date was May 5, 2006.
It was late afternoon in Santa Monica.
and it ended with Milch saying, Okay, fuck it why dont we do none.
Said Callie:
When he hung up, I said What the fuck wasthat?
And then he said They want me to do eight fucking episodes.
I told them to fuck off.
I said I know you told them to fuck off.
But why dont we do fucking eight, and then fucking say we need fucking four more?
Why the fuck do we gotta quit like this?
He said No, no, no I dont like that.
On his way out, Callie told Milch, All right, theyll work it out.
This is fucking stupid.
We got a nice show, a good show.
The HBO exec said he replied, Thats not what Im saying to you.
David, just think about this.
We can work it out.
John from Cincinnatiwas also part of this discussion.
We can just end it.
I said David, thats not the conversation Im trying to have now.
And then I could tell he was struggling.
It was the weekend, and I said, David, just think about it over the weekend.
Lets talk about it next week.
I wasnt going to end this great experience with a bad situation.
Im telling you,this is the story.
A lot of things Ill say to you I dont remember, but I rememberthisstory.
What I just told you is what happened.
Therefore, he could not accept substantially less than 12.
Albrecht added, David knew that Tim Olyphant had just put an offer in on a house.
Six was an affront if you were him.
Eight was something else.
You could build on eight.
But I also said David, just think about this.
We can work it out.
Any time you say to somebody six and they get upset, and you say How about eight?
a halfway intelligent person would say, I bet I could get ten.
It wasnt as if David said eight and hung up the phone.
It wasnt Davidhanging upthe phone.
It was Davidpickingupthe phone then, and calling Tim Olyphant.
That was the problem.
David should have just shut up and calmed down over the weekend.
But he did what he did, and it got out of our hands.
We never canceled the show.
The show canceled itself.
HBO knew they had a public relations nightmare on their hands.
(Deadwoodwas the fourth-highest rated HBO drama of 2005).
Albrecht has never given a clear picture of which outcome he would have preferred.
Strauss was pro-renewal (within limits), as she was and would continue to be Milchs champion.
On Thursday of that week May 11, 2006 Varietyran a story headlined, IsDeadwoodRiding Off Into the Sunset?
IfDeadwoodwasnt dead yet, it sure was looking green around the gills.
Leah Cevoli went through a deep depression that summer.
One day in August, she called her mother to explain the situation.
My mom said, Isnt this around the time you would have started back onDeadwood?
I said Well yeah, mom, I guess it is.
And she said Well honey, these past three years of your life, this was your job.
Of course youre missing it and feeling depressed about it.
And I was like, Yeah.
It was a clash of fucking egos as well as everything else.
The reason it went off was because of human failure.
Cast, crew, and fans were despondent.
Lets not let HBO off the hook here.
And we certainly were never gonna screw somebody over.
It was like David picked up his ball and went home.
And you know Were like:Okay.
So, like I said, I dont remember How about none!
and hanging up, but maybe he did.
Sounds like something David would say.
But I stand by my story, because I know its true.
On June 11, 2006, the New YorkTimespublished a story titled DeadwoodGets a New Lease on Life.
It offered a boiled-down account of the passive cancellation and its fallout.
Both threatened cancellation of subscriptions.
But it was a fathom deep.
Jody Worth believes this was the result of Milchs damage-control trip to New York.
His producers brain told him there was no financial advantage to doing it that way.
Ill take that as pretext for staying with vapid generalities.
Here is an example: There are no enforceable guarantees about anything that really matters.
The truth is, I never had a master plan forDeadwood.
The present moment appears to exclude the twenty-five year alternative.
The two two-hour specials will be a good way to finish the series.
The first thirty-six episodes took an Aristotelian approach to dramatic structuremore-or-less, each story took place in twenty-four hours.
These last two telefilms will deal differently with time.
The Deadwood Bibleand companion works are available exclusively atmzs.press.
