Deadwood and Blank Verse?

The other day in my Shakespeare class we were discussing blank verse and a student commented that HBO's Deadwood was written in it. As I made skeptical sputtering noises, another student said he had heard the same thing. I made some more noises, and we went on with class. I forgot about it until the next morning, when I did some googling to see what I could find on the topic. Sure enough, there were tons of people in chat rooms and on blogs talking about Deadwood's "iambic pentameter." Apparently Sean Hannity even said something about it. What I didn't find were any statements by anyone associated with the show, or by anyone who presented any kind of evidence that they actually knew iambic pentameter from a case of the hiccups. Then I found a link to episode transcripts. After scrolling through them for a while, I was satisfied that I had not been deaf to two seasons worth of metrical dialogue: the show was clearly in prose. Occasionally, there were phrases that scanned, as there will be in any text featuring complete sentences in reasonably complex English. Here's a passage from the pilot episode, spoken by the prospector Ellsworth:

Well here's to you, your majesty. I'll tell you what. I may a fucked my life up flatter than hammered shit, but I stand here before you today beholden to no human cocksucker. And workin' a payin' fuckin' gold claim. And not the U.S. government sayin' I'm trespassin' or the savage fuckin' red man himself or any of these limber dick cocksuckers passin' themselves off as prospectors had better try and stop me.

I've chosen this passage because it comes the closest of any I read to scannability. Here it is, broken into as near an imitation of blank verse as I could manage:

Well here's to you, your majesty. I'll tell
You what. I may a fucked my life up flatter
Than hammered shit, but I stand here before you
Today beholden to no human cocksucker.
And workin' a payin' fuckin' gold claim.
And not the U.S. government sayin'
I'm trespassin' or the savage fuckin' red man
Himself or any of these limber dick
Cocksuckers passin' themselves off
As prospectors had better try and stop me.

That's actually pretty close--I've seen soliloquies in Shakespeare that are prosodically looser. But believe me: that's as close as it gets by a long shot. Is it great writing? Damn skippy it is. But it can be considered metrical only in the sense that it's as carefully calibrated as the best verse (which, I mention just to make it all more confusing, Pound said should be at least as well written as prose).

Here's an exchange between Calamity Jane and Doc Cochran from episode 2 of the first season:

Jane: You're wrong not to trust him [Seth Bullock]. He formed a party that found that little one among all the dead of her family.

Doc: Didn't he? And didn't he also shoot a man he suspected in the murders? And if I were to confide in him when you circulate my optimism, I mean, wouldn't he say, "When the little one speaks, you'll see I was right, not the Sioux killed her family, but road agents?" And supposing it was road agents, and they hear his talk, where's the little one stand then?

Jane: You got a dark turn a mind.

Doc: I see as much misery outta them movin' to justify their selves as them that set out to do harm.

Here it's not even worth trying to lineate it. What this passage has in common with the first one, though, and with all the dialogue from the show, is its syntactical sinewiness. "Not the Sioux killed her family, but road agents": the grammatical compression here makes the action of the verb, sandwiched as it is between two subjects, both enigmatic and sharp. Add that to the further levels of embedded discourse in Doc's speech, and the overall effect is thrilling. Every character in the show carries around multiple voices in addition to their own, because their speech is so densely textual--each sentence is a little story, full of vividly narrated positions.

Because the dialogue of the show imagines the elevated (and debased) registers of nineteenth-century talk so evocatively, it's inevitable that it would be mistaken for blank verse. The essential quality in iambic pentameter is its adaptability to the standard syntactical patterns of the English language ... up until the turn of the twentieth century or so (in America, at least), when a rising tendency towards parataxis made the older metrical forms, with their reliance on hypotactic structures, seem increasingly stiff and unwieldy. The best verse in iambic pentameter over the past hundred years has succeeded by virtue of its baroque manneredness, whereas in earlier periods it succeeded by virtue of its relevance to the dominant mode of polite discourse.