The five best television drama series ever all aired during the last 13 years. Of course, there’s no unanimously agreed-upon list of the best TV shows of all time, and there are certainly people who would argue Lost or The Shield or Hill Street Blues deserve to be a part of the conversation, but the general consensus among critics is that the list of the very best TV dramas should be restricted to The Wire, The Sopranos, Deadwood, Mad Men and Breaking Bad.

These shows have a lot in common. The first three all aired on HBO during roughly the same time period (and, oddly, were all created by guys named David), while the other two currently air on AMC (Mad Men‘s fifth season just started; Breaking Bad‘s fourth ended a few months ago). They’re all dark and – aside from the buttoned-down period piece Mad Men – unapologetically profane and violent.

And they’re all downers – with one exception. Breaking Bad is an unflinchingly stressful documentation of a man’s evolution from milquetoast chemistry teacher to drug lord (or, as creator Vince Gilligan puts it, from “Mr. Chips to Scarface”) while Mad Men loves to immerse itself in the misogyny, racism, greed and ennui of the 1960s.

The Wire and The Sopranos both deal with the inevitability of decline: The Wire by calculating, with heartbreaking clarity, the human damage done by inner-city institutional corruption and The Sopranos by following the unsuccessful therapy sessions of a depressed mobster who feels like he “came in at the end” of America.

But if those shows are about death, Deadwood is about birth. Whereas The Sopranos dealt with a crumbling society – modern, middle-class America – and The Wire with one that had already collapsed – the inner city – Deadwood focuses on the building of a society from the ground up.

It’s a sprawling revisionist Western about the real-world town of Deadwood, a town in Indian Territory at the epicenter of the Black Hills gold rush that prompted George Custer’s expedition toward the Little Bighorn and the eventual absorption of the Dakotas into the United States.

It’s just as gritty as any of the other contenders, if not more so. The West was nothing if not bloody, unpleasant and generally unclean. Creator/showrunner David Milch has a fondness for colorful language of dubious historical authenticity – one character is particularly fond of saying “cocksucker,” which doesn’t really seem like a 19th-century term.

But beneath all that grime is a warmth nearly every other “great TV drama” lacks. There’s all the nudity, murder and drug abuse pay-cable subscribers have come to expect, but Milch is ultimately a humanist, and forgives his characters of their sins. If the writer is the god of his fictional universe, Milch is a benevolent one, able to see the humanity beneath the dried muck and blood that coats everything in his muddy western town.

That’s what’s so special about Deadwood. I’m not going to argue it’s the best television drama of all time – The Wire probably sneaks away with it by a hair – but it’s the one that seems to make best use of the medium.

Although TV writers have become much more ambitious since The Sopranos debuted in 1999, proving that shows could tell serialized stories that unfolded novelistically, over years, and still be commercially successful, the basic appeal of the TV series isn’t its ability to tell multi-season stories, but that it provides a nice place to hang around for 30 to 60 minutes.

Even today, most shows don’t tell long-form stories; you drop in for a bit each week, but the reset button gets hit between episodes. Things are static, they don’t really change and you don’t expect them to, because you enjoy visiting the world of the show. You don’t watch How I Met Your Mother because you’re really dying to find out who the mother is; you watch it because you think Barney Stinson is funny and like hanging out with him. (Put another way: You don’t ‘ship Alex and Elaine, you just enjoy “Vienna Waits.”)

Every TV show has this appeal to some extent, simply by virtue of being a standing weekly appointment. But none of the great dramas have been able to provide the most basic appeal of TV – simply being a nice place to visit.

As much as you might like Wallace and D’Angelo, do you really want to hang out in West Baltimore with the characters from The Wire? Or at the Bada Bing with Tony Soprano? Breaking Bad is probably the worst thing to ever happen to the Albuquerque, N.M., tourism department, and Mad Men is a nice reminder that even if you were lucky enough to be a handsome, successful white man in 1960s New York, you probably still hated yourself. You visit these places because that’s where the art takes you, not because you particularly want to go there.

Deadwood has all the rewards the other great dramas offer – perhaps even more so, because few can match the tangled, Shakespearean beauty of Milch’s dialogue or the charismatic intensity of Ian McShane’s anti-hero saloon owner Al Swearengen, which belongs in the pantheon of all-time great performances in any medium.

But what really sets the show apart is that it goes the extra mile and sets all this within the context of a world audiences might want to take an hour a week to check out. It’s a violent, cruel place, but if you wouldn’t want to sit down for a hand of poker with Wild Bill Hickok and Charlie Utter at The Gem, I don’t think I can help you.

rgifford@umdbk.com