Deadwood

A while back, I procrastinated watching HBO's Deadwood. If you haven't seen it yet, you should - it is fantastic.

Everything about it is brilliant - the acting is awesome, the characters are amazingly complex, the setting and costumes are great and the writing is just unbelievably good.

It tells the story of the Deadwood mining camp during the gold rush in the Black Hills of Dakota Territory in 1876. The three seasons that were filmed show the camp growing up, settling down (somewhat), establishing laws and battling big business in the form of a mining magnate who wants to take over the town.

One of the things it initially got publicity for was the amount of swearing. The producers have tried to be as historically accurate as possible with everything. However, one place where it breaks down is with the swearing. Back then, words like damn, darn, hell, christ, jesus and so on were the most appalling of profanity, with goddamn being the height of obscenity. Today they sound laughably mild. So in Deadwood, they swapped those words for modern words with similar impact.

Thus, the characters in Deadwood regularly say fuck, motherfucker, bastard, asshole, prick, cocksucker, bitch and cunt. The swearing is so pervasive that a site has actually gone to the trouble of calculating the number of fucks per minute: 1.56 fucks per minute across the whole three seasons. Here's a sample of all the swearing from one episode:

How can you not like a program were the towns citizens are called hoopleheads and the favourite epithet is cocksucker?