Robin Weigert is doing the interview rounds for her new show, Dietland, and on the way she gave the Los Angeles Times an update on the status of the long-(long-long-) awaited TV movie that would finally give Deadwood the ending it deserves.
“It’s safe enough to say it’s happening this fall,” Weigert told the LAT’s T.L. Stanley, in a tidbit spun out from a longer feature on her latest role. She added that much of the cast has signed new contrasts and a new set is “being built,” which is heartening news who recall hearing in 2006 that the series’ elaborate sets were being loaded into dumpsters despite the show not having been officially canceled. Weigert said there’s “a 90 percent chance” that the movie will shoot later this year.
Deadwood was a sprawling, ambitious, and gloriously profane show about nothing less than the formation of society, set in the American old west after creator David Milch was told his original setting, ancient Rome, was not available. (RIP, Rome.) Headlined by Ian McShane’s Al Swearengen, as the South Dakota mining town’s all-powerful saloon keeper, the cast, which also included Timothy Olyphant, Molly Parker, and John Hawkes, has gone on to enough success that reassembling them is a near-Herculean task. But they’ve always nourished a clear desire to finish the story they started to tell, and while the wrap-up movie has been close to happening before and fallen through, it’s never seemed quite this close. As a wise man once said, good luck with the fucking store.