🌎 All the World’s a Screen 📺 Iambic Pentameter & Prestige TV

As a classically trained actor turned TV professional, there are two great loves of my life: the works of William Shakespeare and the HBO cinematic universe. I’m continuously reminded how deeply connected these seemingly disparate media canons are. There’s an argument to be made that every great drama since the Renaissance has borrowed from the Bard, which is a (somewhat reductive) way to say that, if you look for it, I've got a sneaky feeling you'll find that Shakespeare actually is all around — especially in prestige TV. 

Adam McKay pitched Succession to its eventual lead, Jeremy Strong, as “‘King Lear’ for the media-industrial complex.” Strong went on to deliver a much-lauded performance as Kendall Roy, a role McKay later likened to the classics: “He's not playing it like a comedy, he's playing it like he’s Hamlet.” The Sopranos has been heralded as “every inch a Shakespearean drama” and let us not forget the lit students everywhere, eager to draw parallels between Game of Thrones and the Bard’s Histories. When the final season of Curb Your Enthusiasm dropped, a former boss of mine said "it's the closest thing I've seen to modern Shakespeare."

After months of slowly savouring it, I finally finished Felix Gillette and John Koblin’s book It's Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, And Future Of HBO, and realized there was a blindspot in my Shakespeare-meets-HBO syllabus. One passage about the David Milch’s 2004 drama series Deadwood stuck with me so much that I flipped back through the pages to permanently dog-ear it and then immediately start the series: 

“Whereas The Wire was frequently tagged as Dickensian, Deadwood came to be commonly known as HBO's Shakespearean drama, thanks to its highly stylized language, elaborate soliloquies, and ornate, oratorical cursing.

‘Oftentimes profanity is used to complete the metrics of a speech,’ Milch said. ‘It's a different thing to say, prick, and to say “fucking prick.” It has to do with rhythm. The audience will incorporate that intuition without it ever rising to the level of consciousness.... If the metrics of the profanity aren't right, it sounds stupid.’”

The narrative and thematic similarities between television drama and classical literature are undeniable — audiences will never stop craving that wit and grit. But it wasn’t until I read that passage that I considered how important metre can be in contemporary TV dialogue. Curious, I dug deeper and learned that David Milch wrote much of Deadwood in iambic pentameter, which explains why even the most profane lines, spoken by the town’s roughest characters, still sound like poetry. Iambic pentameter mimics the human heartbeat — it keeps the verse ALIVE, and the rhythm of this show is palpable.

Set in a lawless pocket of Dakota Territory in the late 19th century, the three-season series offers a raw and intimate portrait of American history. Its ensemble spans ex-lawmen, wealthy prospectors, brothel owners, and the women they employ (to put it more mildly than the show ever would.) It’s a world as grounded in mud as it is elevated by rhythm.

Cancelled after its third season, it never reached the same level of fame as Sopranos or even The Wire, but linguistically, it's unmatched. Reflecting on his process, Milch explains his inspiration for the language in the series as an indicator of class:

I was also interested in the patterns of speech and the distinction between people who had what was called book learning and people who didn’t. The people who had book learning tended to speak in an almost Elizabethan way. This was Victorian times. For those who had book learning, it was the Bible, Shakespeare, Dickens, Victorian literature, plus adventure stories, but that access wasn’t strictly tied to class. — Creator David Milch on Language and Obscenity in Deadwood

So Deadwood doesn't just borrow from Shakespeare; it reflects a time when classic literature was actively shaping how people spoke. That lyrical mix of elevated text and bawdiness feels reminiscent of Falstaff or Macbeth's Porter because it is — paratextually for Milch and textually for his characters. 

Aside from being super interesting, I began wondering how this lesson in rhythm could be implemented into my own professional practice. In the past when I’ve dabbled in writing, a ghost of my actor-self has come back to haunt me: rather than worrying about the scene’s purpose, I’d find myself dwelling on whether this line needs an “um” or an “ah”, a “shit” or a “damn”, an “everyone” or an “everybody.” I’m beginning to see why those were my instincts, but now that I’m the one reading the scripts and not the one writing them, this understanding can actually be an asset instead of a curse. This is a tangible reason why a line just ✨feels weird✨ 

The rhythms and metres that shape our speech patterns are not only learned, but deeply colloquial, regional, and cultural. They play a huge role in whether something feels authentic or, conversely, phoney. A few recent TikTok trends capture this phenomenon beautifully. Actors have been performing of Shakespeare in an Appalachian accent and, surprisingly, viewers are finding the text easier to understand, even when the words remain the same. Similarly, a viral Twitter post playfully roasting Lily-Rose Depp ("trench coat buttoned to the TOP") has been reinterpreted in various dialects, turning the original NYC-based "monologue" (so to speak) into regionally specific versions: London, Toronto, Québecois, Brazilian, Irish — you name it. While the sentiment (and often the language) stays the same, the tone, delivery, and cultural nuances shift with the dialect, revealing just how much of communication is embedded in how we speak, not just what we say. It's all in the rhythm 🥁

All of the above ties back to the quote about Deadwood: "the audience will incorporate that intuition without it ever rising to the level of consciousness." Which is all fine and dandy until you actually become aware of it... and then you can't watch your latest TV obsession without tapping along during every monologue (da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM...) Well, as they say, you can take the girl out of theatre school, but you can't take the theatre school out of the girl! 🎭