Gift Guide: Deadwood and the Most Versatile Swear Word Ever

"There ain't much to country living," sang Warren Zevon. "Sweat, piss, jizz and blood." Those four fluids are present in prodigious quantities throughout the three seasons of David Milch's HBO western Deadwood, now available on the Blu-ray set Deadwood: The Complete Series.

With the roughness of unfinished wood planks and the grin of a rotting corpse, the show might have been a Saturday-matinee serial version of Wisconsin Death Trip. Milch and his team of writers and directors set the show up as a moral showdown between Sherriff Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant) and the town's boss Al Swearengen (Ian McShane), one of the sexiest and most charismatic villains ever to grace a television screen. But Milch was far too smart, and far too wary of the comforting fantasy of American innocence, to present our pioneer past through the lens of simple Fordian nobility. Without ever settling for cheap cynicism, Deadwood recast our founding myth as something like Western noir. In addition, it made "cocksucker" seem like the most expressive word in the language.

$137.99 @ Amazon