I agree that "Deadwood" is in almost every respect an excellent prime-time soap opera, infused with more than a little accurate history of life on the frontier.

The exception is its unrelenting use of extreme cursing, far greater in number and scope than any silliness on South Park.

Cursing like this is a series of verbal farts. If farting is ever justified in drama -- and it has been, since the time of Aristophanes, it is understood that there can be too much of an offensive thing.

The language farts in Deadwood are used to punctuate sentences, rather like Victor Borge's audible punctuation shtik, but with far greater vulgarity. Borge's routine lasted only a few minutes and were an amusing novelty. "Deadwood's" vile punctuations have lasted for three years and quickly became an oppressive overtone.

Still, that would be valid if it resembled in any way what actually happened on the frontier. We have it from a real authority, Louis L'Amour, whose deep research informed his many Western novels, that cursing was actually rare among real frontiersmen.

Well, today we are much more liberated in our social conventions, so doesn't that justify the cursing? Don't we see plenty of that in R-rated movies? Yes, but not like this.

Cursing is just another communications tool. It is used for emphasis, in the company of those who the speaker judges will understand and appreciate its context. Think of it as a verbal exclamation mark.

Now think of those occasion bad writers who use exclamation marks to end every sentence. It's a complete distraction from the text, isn't it?

That's why even in social strata where cursing is used a lot in routine conversations, it is not used indiscriminately as it is in "Deadwood", because it is not natural to do so.

The series can't be seen by large chunks of the world who stick to PG-rated fare, and no doubt will therefore be bowdlerized to reach that audience one day, but the result, with visible disjunctions between mouth movements and sound edits every few seconds, will be as distracting as the original.

This could have been avoided by realizing in advance that a curse-free version was needed and shooting a cleaned-up version side by side with the vulgar one. This has been done before, though rarely. I'm going to hope that author Milch has done that and is going to spring it on us soon.

For those who can remember this far back, the contrast with the Golden Age of Television is sharp. Really wonderful works of dramatic art were created or revised for the new medium of television, and were available to everyone on a weekly basis. They had huge impact and remain honored and appreciated to this day.

And there wasn't a single curse word in any of them.