Greeting and salutations, my dearies! Here’s what I found this week…

On the 24th, Alan Sepinwall provided a primer of Deadwood for anyone that wants to get caught up before watching the movie, over at Rolling Stone:
“Deadwood: The Movie will debut on HBO on May 31st, nearly 13 years after the pay cable giant aired the unplanned series finale. That’s a very long time, particularly in Peak TV. You may have questions, whether you watched every episode back in the day or have experienced the show entirely through Richardson thumbs-up memes. So let’s trudge through the muddy thoroughfare to find answers!”

Ann Helen Petersen analyzed how Kate Hudson went from up-and-coming star to leggings maven for BuzzFeed on the 25th:
“Instead of allowing another company to exploit their image, these celebrities are doing it themselves. They’ve essentially taken out the middleman (and it was almost always a man) of the celebrity endorsement business and paved a profitable path forward as options in Hollywood became sparse. What’s so different about using your brand to prop up a forgettable rom-com that most people will watch on VOD, and using your brand to sell “wellness” and leggings? In truth, Hudson was always selling a vision of her life — the only change is that people are now paying her for its accoutrements. It’s a triumph, in a way. But it’s also an illustration of how few options are open to stars “of a certain age” in Hollywood — and what’s lost when you transform a celebrity brand into a retail one.”

Jackson McHenry of Vulture discussed how Michelle Williams mastered Gwen Verdon’s voice in Fosse/Verdon, on the 28th:
“Each week on Fosse/Verdon, Michelle Williams is giving one of the most fascinating vocal performances on TV. As Gwen Verdon, she adopts a theatrical, mid-century, pseudo mid-Atlantic lilt, full of flourishes and misplaced stresses that vary in strength and timbre as the FX miniseries hopscotches around Verdon and Bob Fosse’s creative and romantic history. In the show’s penultimate episode, a showcase for Williams set around the premiere of Chicago, she also had to pretend to lose her voice. The real Verdon struggled to perform the musical’s songs, eventually dropped out of the show, and went through vocal surgery after infamously swallowing confetti during a performance. While she had a dialect coach, Williams figured out how to play Verdon’s vocal disintegration on her own.”

On the 30th, Kate Erbland talked about how much male critics outnumber female ones at IndieWire:
“Male film critics are still dominating the industry, a new study finds. Now in its second decade, the “Thumbs Down” study is the most comprehensive and longest-running study of women’s representation and impact as film reviewers available. The latest incarnation of the study finds that men comprise 66% and women 34% of film reviewers working for print, broadcast, and online outlets in the U.S. Last year, women made up 32% of reviewers, a slight uptick of note in a changing culture.”

Finally, because one can never have enough Deadwood articles, here’s one that The Ringer published on the 30th by Rob Harvilla:
“We proud members of the Deadwood hive—we patrons of the Gem Saloon, we Hoopleheads, we [multiple expletives deleted]—each have our own most cherished character, cherished scene, cherished soliloquy, cherished expletive. Me, I fire up HBO Go once a month or so to watch Seth Bullock unwittingly interrupt his business partner having sex in their hardware store. It is far too minor an incident to ever make a janky YouTube highlight reel. By design, most of the show’s best moments are.”

Enjoy!