Now, that's a separate matter from the illusions ... What we say in our treasured documents is not, "These truths are self-evident, that all men are created equal." What we say is, "We hold these truths to be self-evident" -- in other words, we're going to act as if these truths are self-evident, but in practice, those truths have never been self-evident. And the reason that cops only trust other cops is because they know that they've been hired to lie, they've been hired to beat the balls off people, and get them to confess so they can be excluded from society. That's the first part of their job. The second part of their job is to lie about what they did. And the third part of their job is to know that if they're caught, they're going to be put in jail.

So for me, what every cop always told me was, "Every time I see a guy in a suit, I'm afraid I'm gonna get locked up." I wanted to push that situation further, to the point where it was acknowledged by everyone that there was no law, and then to try and figure out how we govern ourselves, how we improvise the structures of governance in an environment which acknowledges that it is the abrogation of everything but brute force.

As you watch "Deadwood," you find yourself believing in this moral relativism. You start to fear the hand of the law more than you fear the chaos of unchecked crime. You start to feel that the law has no place in this environment.

Or that the place that it finds is predicated in an illusion. Seth Bullock -- I would say 90 percent of the characters are real -- and Bullock, who was the first sheriff and who founded the first national park and became Theodore Roosevelt's best friend and in fact led the inauguration parade, was a guy with a murderous personality who embraced the idea of law as the only way he could control himself. The first scene of the first episode shows him hanging a guy rather than letting the mob hang him. That was a true story, and what he said was, "If he's gonna be hung, he's gonna be hung under color of law." For Bullock, the color of law as a disinfecting of the kind of violence which was inside him, as an accommodation and protection of him from himself, was the essence of his personality. That's a highly adaptive trait in the kind of Darwinian environment that he found himself in -- which is to say, he was every bit as violent as the next guy, but his violence expressed itself in an impulse to expressions of order. And so, that's how legal codes get developed.

You know, Oliver Wendell Holmes, in a study of the common law, said that the law develops out of society's need to minimize the collateral consequences of the taking of revenge. What that means is, if I kill your horse, and you come and kill my horse and my family and burn down my house, the disruption to society of the collateral effects of the taking of revenge, which is justified, is such that society is gonna be disrupted. So what law does is say, "If you kill a horse, you will be subject to this much punishment." To the extent that that stabilizes the process of taking of revenge, that's how laws get developed.

How do you see the sinister Al Swearengen (Ian McShane) relative to Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant)? Because in Bullock, you describe a certain kind of twisting of chaos and order, and good and bad.

To me, they're part of the same personality. I try not to judge any of the characters. Henry James used to say that characters are obstinate finalities, and irreducible. I think you'll see in the first episode just how indissolubly associated those two characters are. And in real life, they sort of divided the camp. It was like a Manichaean heresy. Swearengen ran the Badlands and Bullock ran the rest of the camp. But I think that each of them is lost in a particular way. I don't think that Swearengen has any more of an articulate understanding of what moves him than Bullock does; it's just that his compulsions do not invoke a legal framework. You know, if you look at Swearengen, all of Swearengen's whores are bought at the same orphanage where he was raised, including a cripple who has absolutely no use to him at any pragmatic level. He is constantly presenting himself as a pure pragmatist, yet to insist on getting your whores at one particular orphanage is at once an impulse to take revenge on women, and also to rescue women. And in that complication is where most of us live our lives. And he no less than Bullock has a life which lives him, much more, I think, than he lives his life.

It's that inner conflict that's very relatable in each character.

Yeah, I think Swearengen is a lineal descent of Sipowitz on "NYPD Blue." You know, as they say, the devil always gets the best lines. Sipowitz was, in a lot of ways, very much like my dad, who was as complicated and driven and finally a great, great soul, with all sorts of compulsions and abuses and so on. I think that God takes us whole. And as you say, Swearengen is a very relatable personality. I think ultimately Bullock is every bit as relatable but not nearly so accessible.

That's funny, because Swearengen kind of reminds me of my dad in some ways; Ian McShane looks a little like him, for one thing. What's interesting is that Swearengen has more outlets for his passionate personality than Bullock does. So in some ways, it feels like Bullock is more tortured than Swearengen is.

Yes, exactly. [Bullock] will not share himself in the same way.

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