David Milch has taken one of the most convoluted imaginable paths to success in television. Having earned an M.F.A. in fiction at the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, he went on to teach literature at Yale for nine years and became close friends with a man he now regards as one of his mentors, the great novelist and poet Robert Penn Warren. From 1982 to 1987 he wrote for “Hill Street Blues,” proving that if television scripts were not actually literature, they could, at the least, be first-rate drama. With “NYPD Blue” (1993–2005) he took the urban crime drama to new levels of complexity and intensity.

“Deadwood,” the series he created, begins its third season in June. The supercharged dramatization of actual events in the legendary South Dakota gold-mining town has done for the American West what “The Sopranos” has done for mob mythology, competing with that series for the unofficial title of the most scintillating hour on television. While preparing for the season premiere, Milch took some time off to assess the impact of “Deadwood” on our perceptions and misperceptions of frontier America.

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