On the set of Deadwood: The Movie—a new, 110-minute conclusion to the HBO series—the show’s creator, David Milch, read Robert Penn Warren poems to the cast. Warren was Milch’s writing teacher when he was at Yale, and they kept up a correspondence long after. When Warren was dying, he summoned Milch to his side. When Milch was writing Deadwood, he would read his old friend’s poems “at least three mornings a week.” The words established a tone for the series, set in a gold mining camp in the unincorporated territory of South Dakota in 1876. “Tell me a story,” Warren writes in one poem, “In this century, and moment, of mania, / Tell me a story. Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.”

Deadwood is a rollicking drama about the mania that was the violent colonization of the American West, with all its greed, brutality, and misrule. It is filled with great distances and starlight. The final scene of the Deadwood film ends on a cold, clear night, as snow begins to fall outside the Gem Saloon, the bar and brothel owned by the murderous Al Swearengen (Ian McShane). It is now 1889, and South Dakota has officially joined the Union as a state; Deadwood, no longer just a lawless hitching post, has grown into a town. All of this brings a fresh order to the proceedings, a stark quietness to a place where, for years, people seemed never to stop screaming “cocksucker” at each other day and night. Somewhere in the distance, a woman sings a verse of “Waltzing Matilda.”

This may sound like a sentimental conclusion for a show that plainly depicted bloodshed and subjugation, and often seemed to revel in the more abject qualities of the American West. The downy, wintery final moments of the film feel more like the soft landing of a narrative quietly closing its loop, which is all Warren asked for in his poetry: Tell me a story. And after watching the final chapter of Deadwood, I’m convinced it is one of the best stories ever put on television, and one that, although it is not set “in this century, and moment,” feels suddenly, deeply resonant.

Deadwood, in its early 2000s heyday, was one of a trio of early “prestige” HBO dramas that explored different underbellies of American life: The Sopranos looked at mob brutishness, The Wire spun a Greek tragedy out of the backstreets of Baltimore. The creators of these programs, all white men, formed a kind of princely pantheon of showrunners and were regularly grouped together by the press as mavericks and visionaries. In his book about them, Difficult Men, the writer Brett Martin identified a “third golden age” of television, in which a series of great men made shows about great and troubled men. As for the overwhelming maleness of the field, Martin proposed that “certainly the autocratic power of the showrunner-auteur scratches a peculiarly masculine itch.”

For these reasons, I avoided Deadwood for a long time. I had heard it was a show in which cowboys rape prostitutes, in which McShane played yet another vainglorious anti-hero whose use of the word “fuck” every 20 seconds was an edgy tic, in which gratuitous murders made up a large portion of the action. I’d seen old Westerns, the ways they often glorified white men in saddles and depicted Native Americans and women with less poetry than they accorded the sunsets. I had no need to see this “masculine itch” satisfied on TV.