Everybody swears like a trooper in the new drama series Deadwood (premiering on HBO on Tuesday at 10.15pm). The F-word is the most popular, frequently peppering the dialogue, while Channel Hop swears the C-word was used at least twice in the first episode.
'Total f***s in season one: 831; average f***s per episode: 69.3; cumulative season one f***s per minute: 1.23,' the website crows. In episode one alone, the word is uttered 55 times, or once almost every minute. Season two, already playing in the United States, sees the writers up the ante, with the word used a staggering 1,099 times.
While the triple X dialogue takes some getting used to, the series is brilliant, taking us on a wild, no-holds-barred ride to the gold rush days of 1870s America.
Forget the cheesy Bonanza and Gunsmoke; you can't get more realistic than Deadwood, set in a lawless gold-mining camp of the same name where there's at least one murder a day and brawls break out at the drop of a Stetson. Teeming with fortune-seekers, gunslingers, criminals and prostitutes, the town is in the Black Hills of South Dakota; the centre of a gold rush in what proved to be the richest gold strike in American history.
Based on real characters, such as Calamity Jane and the legendary Wild Bill Hickok, and true events of the gold rush, the Emmy and Golden Globe award-winning series was created by David Milch of NYPD Blue, Brooklyn South and Hill Street Blues fame.