Whence 'Deadwood'?

A friend writes:

Too bad the HBO meetings occurred right away. I still feel in the dark about what exactly happened to 'Deadwood' 's future and (even tho your blog entry makes it clear the topic was broached) feel whatever did happen was under-reported and definitely not on the radar at all till AFTER it was a done deal. Was it Milch or HBO that wanted out, really? Why didn't this happen with 'The Wire' or 'Six Feet Under'? Was 'Deadwood' particularly expensive to produce or esp. lacking in some target demographic that HBO wanted? If so, why in hell do pay cable networks care about demographics?

Worse than not knowing any of that though, is Albrecht's generalized 'answer' to these sorts of questions invoking 'Carnivalé'. I get that he was saying 'I've already been through worse backlashes than this one' but mentioning the two series in the same breath makes him seem VERY dim as to their relative quality or compelling reasons to continue and in turn as if anything excellent that's happened while he's been giving the okays was pure accident! What ACTUALLY happened? And screw Milch if he thinks ANYTHING about surfers is going to be as touched by fire as 'Deadwood'.

Here's the entirety of HBO President Chris Albrecht's answer to a question about reaction to the sudden last season for David Milch's 'Deadwood.' It indicates that what happened may have been the result of a single day's misunderstanding.

Q: I got a lot of e-mail after the 'Deadwood' thing, and some of it was actually quite scary. What's your e-mail been like?

Albrecht: My favorite one was, 'May you never take an easy dump again.' I sent that to a few friends. But being Italian, that was not a problem. I knew it would never be a problem for me. I got a lot of 'Deadwood' e-mails too. But I'll tell you, a fraction of what I got for 'Carnivale.' So it really goes to show how there's not always -- what is that ringing? Do we know? Is that just in my head?

There is a disconnect often between what's written about a show in terms of the appreciation for the quality of a show or the content of a show and the audience's feel for it. What happened with 'Deadwood,' and I think we would all like to revisit the phone call that I had with David Milch, was David pitched a show that I hope you will agree when it goes on, is so unique and very exciting. I knew that there were at most 12 more 'Deadwood's.

I said to David, let's do six and start the new show earlier because there's only a finite amount of time David Milch has to do all of the work that he does on the shows. David Milch, David Simon, David Chase, all these guys, Alan Ball, they are so involved in what they do from the writing process through the end of the editing process. [We] ave to pry the shows out of their hands to get them on the air. And David at that point says, 'Ah, you know what? It's enough. Let's just move on. You're right.'

And I said, 'David, think about it over the weekend,' and he called some actors and the story got out of hand, and I think everybody wished they had that Friday to think about it again because it was really just, you know, 12, 6, 8 -- I know the world thinks that 12 more hours of 'Deadwood' is the exact number to end the story exactly correctly, but maybe in a conversation we could find out a way to do that a little differently.