Yes, it can be a vicious and brutal show (although unlike THE SOPRANOS, it has some morally upright characters, including Brad Douriff, Grima Wormtongue himself, who's genuinely if unconventionally heroic as the town doctor). Ian McShane's Al Swearingen began the first season as a woman-beating thug, but now his brothel-owning kingpin is much more nuanced than that and has a much different relationship with Trixie, the whore who can always tell him when he's full of shit (in fact, Al hasn't hit a woman since the first few episodes and seems unlikely to in the future). It's a magnificent performance and a beautifully written character.

Indeed, the writing is what really impresses me about the show. Don't believe those people who try to tell you it's nothing but a lot of cursing. Yes, the characters say "fuck" a lot, but only some of them (how much they curse is very much determined by their status in this society), and they generally say it in a convincing period way. What I love about the dialogue is how it mixes the profane and scatalogical with archaic usage and complex phrasings and rhythms derived from Shakespeare and the King James Bible. No, it's not completley accurate. Many people in the Old West were known for their "blasphemous" and "obscene" language, and we know that real historical figures like Mark Twain and Sir Richard Francis Burton and the author of MY SECRET LIFE used words like "shit" and "piss" and "goddam" and "fart" and even "cunt" and "fuck." What they probably didn't do was use the words "cocksucker" and "motherfucker," epithets of which the more profane speakers on DEADWOOD are particularly fond (although the concepts certainly weren't unknown), but even these anachronism work in the flow of the complex language and I can't imagine the dialogue being as effective withou them. It's as densely written as Pinter or Stoppard.