Actor connects new and old Western dramas
Gerald McRaney’s place in TV history is secured by his steady work in shows ranging from “Simon & Simon” in the 1980s to an upcoming fall drama for CBS, “Jericho.”
He’s also the link between television’s former and current incarnations of the Old West – the airbrushed “Gunsmoke” and HBO’s pockmarks-and-all series “Deadwood.”
McRaney, who joined “Deadwood” as a guest star last season, had the honor of being the final bad guy on “Gunsmoke” to face U.S. Marshal Matt Dillon in what he calls “that classic showdown with two of you drawing against each other.”
His character was killed in that 1975 episode and good prevailed once again in Dodge City.
“Gunsmoke,” although seen as TV’s first adult-oriented Western, was so upright that Miss Kitty – who in the original radio version seemed to be a madam – became merely a saloon owner with an usual number of female employees.
In the messy, forthright world of “Deadwood,” a hooker is a hooker and virtue and vice share breathing room in the ragged South Dakota town of the late 1870s.
McRaney plays mining baron George Hearst, among the historically based characters populating the drama that returns tonight for its third and final 12-episode season.
HBO announced last week that the series will conclude with a pair of two-hour specials, as yet unscheduled.
Known for such characters as easygoing Rick Simon, a Marine in “Major Dad” and a family man on “Promised Land,” McRaney is aware that some were surprised by his jump to the coarse and brutal “Deadwood.”
No mystery there, he says: “It’s because it’s good.”
So is the Mississippi-born actor. Wearing the comfortably well-padded look of a 19th-century man of power and wealth, McRaney proves slyly adept at portraying a Hearst whose hands stay clean while brutal acts are carried out on his behalf.
Researching the real Hearst (father of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst), McRaney found he was likely less erudite than depicted on “Deadwood” but as intent on accumulating gold and silver – dubbed “the color” on the show.
“The money didn’t matter to him,” McRaney says. “He was like a stamp collector. … It wasn’t a matter of ‘What is the value of all these stamps?’ but, ‘I have them and other people don’t.’ “
McRaney, 57, will be a featured player throughout this season in what he calls the plum role of his career, bar none.
“I don’t mean to diminish any of the people I’ve worked with,” he says. “The circumstances that get dictated in network television just don’t permit the kind of luxuriousness that we have in creating ‘Deadwood.’ “
That is measured in time, money and artistic freedom – which includes a chorus of profanity that some viewers find wondrous and others off-putting.
But it’s all in context, says McRaney, whose character holds his tongue.
“The guys who use a lot of foul language are pimps. And the people around them are assistant pimps and (prostitutes), and they were not known for their lofty language,” he says.
McRaney savors the offbeat elegance of the language provided by “Deadwood” creator-executive producer David Milch and the other writers, a dialogue that at once seems as classic as Shakespeare and as new and rhythmic as rap.
“David has a very specific take on what he wants,” McRaney says. “If a thing is too on the money, if a thing is too direct, that’s not good enough. We have to find the curves in there.
“And if it’s too well-defined, let’s find some emptiness to play – to give it texture, and also to give it human imperfection.”