If you expect David Milch to concisely explain the premise of his inscrutable new HBO drama, we have three words for you:
Not gonna happen.
Maestro Milch, who could discourse metaphysically about cardboard, takes offense at the notion that John From Cincinnati can be summarized in one neat, TV-grid-friendly sentence.
HBO can't do it, either, apparently. John's marketing campaign is as enigmatic as the "surf noir" series itself, which hits the beach at 10 p.m. Sunday.
"This show cannot be sold in a sound-bite," sniffs Milch, 62, creator of HBO's Deadwood and cocreator of NYPD Blue.
"The absence of an identifiable convention is what makes the show hard to explain. You can't say it's a mystery or a western or an anti-western or a comedy or a tragedy. . . . You can't necessarily put a name on every experience in order to sell it."
That means viewers will have to decipher Milch's meaning for themselves. But HBO is so high on his outlandish new series that it's launching John in the primo slot following the series finale of The Sopranos. The remaining nine episodes run at 9 p.m.
In broad strokes, John follows the Yosts of Imperial Beach, Calif., a dysfunctional family of legendary surfers that includes withdrawn patriarch Mitch (Bruce Greenwood), his junkie son, Butchie (Brian Van Holt), and 13-year-old grandson, Shaun (Greyson Fletcher), a champion in the making.
When a curiously disengaged stranger named John (Austin Nichols) shows up, weird things start happening in Yost-world. Other regulars include Luke Perry, Rebecca De Mornay and Ed O'Neill. Noted surf novelist Kem Nunn (Tijuana Straits) is cocreator.
The first words spoken in the series are John's: "The end is near." Conversation-wise, it's downhill from there.
"The world he comes into is a very, very sick family," says Milch. "You could say that it's the family of man, or Western culture, where purists justify their purity by abstaining from society, and where addiction is rampant."
When pressed, Milch says the overall theme of the piece is "the elusiveness of meaning, absent a humane commitment to the experience."
Even Hemingway couldn't reduce that to a snappy logline.
"If that's your racket, figure it out," Milch snaps. "I don't give a [expletive.] It's not my job. My job is to write the show.
"It doesn't mean I'm being willful as an artist. I just won't spoon-feed the audience what John means and thereby prevent them from experiencing the heart of the show."
