Feeling Nostalgic about the Wild, Wild Western

Like a lot of people -- more of them almost every week -- I'm loving my Sunday night dose of HBO's True Blood, one of the most enjoyable thrill rides on TV right now. But unlike most people, I have another Sunday night thrill-ride TV treat: DirecTV 101 Network's weekly rerun of HBO's 2004-06 series Deadwood.

That show, plus recommending and re-watching last week's AMC repeat of 1989's Lonesome Dove CBS miniseries, has me wondering. Will we ever see TV Westerns that good again? For that matter, will we ever see TELEVISION that good again?...

The only thing to mourn about Deadwood is that HBO cut it short at least one year too early. There was so much life left in that series, so many rich and resonant characters, and so much wild and true history from which to drama, that HBO should have persuaded David Milch to stay the course, rather than shift to, sigh, John from Cincinnati.

The 101 Network's weekly cycle of reruns just started season two last week, and featured a bloody fistfight between Ian McShane's town boss Al Swearengen and Timothy Olyphant's newly elected sheriff, Seth Bullock, that was nothing short of epic.

This week (9p ET, with lots of same-week repeats), both men are disfigured by their battle, and the next round is coming up: Seth had left his badge and gun in Swearengen's office, removing them to fight him as a private citizen, and is intent on reclaiming them. Swearengen's cold-blooded lieutenant, Dan, suggests Al gives Bullock a taste of Al's knife blade instead, and the stage is set for another superbly written, astoundingly acted episode.

Deadwood is an exceptionally excellent and entertaining TV series -- and, as a Western, it's equally rare. But this sort of brilliant TV, on cable, is alive and very, very well. Not only with True Blood and AMC's Mad Men right now, but with FX's Rescue Me, and with a new season of Showtime's Dexter right around the corner.

But watching Lonesome Dove again, and seeing what the broadcast networks once aspired to do, that's a different matter altogether. Watching that miniseries, with Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones as retired Texas Rangers in a country fast losing its open spaces, made me sad not only about the vanishing wilderness, but about broadcast TV's vanishing aspirations.

If CBS, or any other broadcast network, would throw its money and effort into just one Lonesome Dove every few years, it might stave off its own slide into mediocrity and relative irrelevance. Doing something special, something wonderful, is one way to attract an audience -- and, just maybe, steal back some of those Emmys in categories now surrendered almost automatically to cable networks.

Five years later, Deadwood still impresses. Twenty years later, so does Lonesome Dove. How many shows that the broadcast networks are now presenting can hope for the same claim?