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Chance Likes to Watch, John Likes to Surf
2007-06-11 04:20
by Mark T.R. Donohue

Let's get the only non-ambiguous thing about HBO's new "John from Cincinnati" out of the way first: This show is doomed. If the pay-cable network couldn't find a way to force people to sit down and pay attention to "Carnivàle," which was equally ambitious but much easier to watch, I don't know how they're going to feel about the ratings returns for David Milch and Kem Nunn's new show. Maybe they don't care at all. Conspiracy theory alert: This review suggests that HBO was delighted to have an escape hatch from having to pony up for another season of the very costly "Deadwood," which for all its acclaim had an audience consisting predominantly of print TV critics and wannabes like myself. In ten years see if we're not calling "Deadwood" the premium cable series equivalent of the Velvet Underground, the show hardly anybody watched but all those who did went on to become television writers.

The early reviews of "John from Cincinnati" make for an illuminating read. Without question, this is the kind of show which requires a lot of external research, since no answers whatsoever are forthcoming during the progam's running time. For the Sunday night premiere, HBO tacked on at the end a brief interview with David Milch that made if anything even less sense than the pilot. The funny thing is, for all of these critics' protestations of having no idea what "John" is supposed to be about, the reviews read remarkably similarly, be they positive or negative. I think that's probably because it's a lot easier to try and deal with "John" at a surface level than open up the deep black can of worms of what it all means. If professional television writers get a headache just considering this, it's hard to imagine "John from Cincinnati" connecting with a mass audience. So here's the easy way out: You summarize the plot, such as it is, which will make the show sound like a ponderous, howlingly pretentious mess (which, OK, yeah, it kinda is) and then you're done with it. If you did anything that might encourage people to watch, chances are you might have to write about it again, and that would be hard.

Well, I'm going to stick with "John from Cincinnati." Maybe I'll even have the kind of smashing insight that our entrenched television pundits have all passed on offering. As I wrote just a few hours ago, I was prepared to hate this show, due to its connection with the premature burial of "Deadwood." And the pilot didn't do itself any favors. After spending so much time with "Deadwood" I was prepared for any number of two-character scenes that didn't move from Point A to Point B in the traditional small-screen narrative style. Likewise, it didn't much bother me that certain of the characters were possessed apropos of nothing to begin speaking entirely in epigrams. That's David Milch's style, you either take it or you leave it. Granted, "Deadwood" had a lot more of a logical basis for a cast of characters that didn't so much have conversations as exchange soliloquies. In the 19th century, before television and radio, men's words were their reputations; Abraham Lincoln became a national political figure largely on the basis of newspaper transcripts of his debates with Stephen Douglas. If you go back and read the personal letters and speeches of famous Americans from the period in which "Deadwood" was set, needless grandiloquence and tortured allusions (especially to classical Greek and Roman works) were just the style of the times.

As for present-day Imperial Beach, California, that's a bit of a stretch. Some suspension of belief will just have to be maintained as to why characters like surf-groupie lawyer Meyer Dickstein (Willie Garson), damaged gay lottery winner Barry Cunningham (Matt Winston), and especially ex-cop and bird fancier Bill Jacks (Ed O'Neill) fulminate for paragraphs at a time with the fluency and force of E.B. Farnum at his sweatiest. But in my estimation one of the things that is most compelling about "John" is the way that many of the characters speak and behave as if they are existing in entirely different universes even when sharing scenes with each other. For a lesser talent than David Milch, you would take this as a sign of incompetence, but Milch is quite up front about his desire to challenge people's very experience of reality with "John from Cincinnati." The show is perilously ambitious, but for all of its opaque dialogue, extraneous characters, and crippling inconsistencies in tone, I kind of like it. Television is a different medium from film and music, because of the way that productions continue to develop and change and respond to the reactions of their audiences. When a musician has too many ideas for his own good and no real coherent plan for tying them all together, the result is usually a mess with isolated highlights, like QuadropheniaMellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, or Springsteen's The River. Most great filmmakers have that one that got away, a movie where they weren't able to rein in all of their competing ideas within the limited amount of time they had to shoot them and the finished product has few if any redeeming values. "John from Cincinnati" has that feeling at its outset, but it's far from being a completed work. If he gets a chance Milch has a chance to pull this mess together into something special.

The cast helps a lot. Newcomer Greyson Fletcher is winning and natural as 13-year-old rising surf star Shaun Yost. One of the problems you can see for "John from Cincinnati" going forward is a lack of emotional connection between the audience and all of the ponderous exploration of the fundamental nature of reality. Fletcher is the panacea. Just go back and watch his timing and facial expression in the pilot when he pointedly uses the past tense after his estranged, junkie father asks him how sixth grade is going. Brian Van Holt is immediately compelling as the unfortunately named Butchie Yost, Shaun's loser dad and a guy who took his corporate-crafted image as famed pro surfer "The Beast" a little too close to heart. Since this is a Milch piece, everywhere you turn there is another one of those character actors who never disappoints -- Jim Beaver, Garson, Luis Guzman, Jeremy Howard. O'Neill (whom I prefer to think of as one of David Mamet's repertory players rather than as Al Bundy) is flat-out-riveting, and pro surfer Keala Kennelly has an authentic ease as an apprentice boardmaker at the shop the Yosts run. Things are a little more troublesome with the nominal leads. Bruce Greenwood's Mitch is frustratingly passive for a legendary patriarch, and as his irritable wife Rebecca De Mornay doesn't make a single right choice in the pilot presentation that doesn't involve wardrobe. That said, wow, no woman pushing fifty ought to fill out a pair of jeans like that.

The biggest problem with "John from Cincinnati," actually, is John from Cincinnati. I don't have a huge issue with the concept of the character or the casting of Austin Nichols, but Milch needs to dial back the idiot-savant dialogue catchphrases. A lot. It's not his usual M.O. to be this unsubtle and repetitive. With so many characters able to deliver great lines and Milch eminently capable of filling their mouths with pretty words, why is so much of the pilot script dedicated to John saying the same few lines over and over and over and over again? If John doesn't learn to be more of a strong, silent type in the next few episodes, I'm going to lose a lot of my initial goodwill for his show. As for now I much prefer the literal parrot in the cast, Bill's Lazarus-like pet Zippy. Give us a kiss!

In the final analysis, I think I had a positive response to the idea of "John from Cincinnati" as a series despite the shaky pilot for one counterintuitive reason. The show doesn't promise us anything. This isn't a "Lost" or "Heroes" situation where all of the mysteries are supposed to pay off in some meaningful logical way after a certain amount of time. You will get out of this show exactly as much as you are willing to put into it. There aren't a lot of television shows like that around. Of course, one of them was "Deadwood," which had to die so that this show could be born, but let's not hold it against "John from Cincinnati." The deck is stacked against its survival as it stands.

Comments
2007-06-11 13:45:33
1.   Jon Weisman
Except for the ill-chosen shots at The River and Quadrophenia, I liked this piece. I too had expectations lowered for this show, but I'm definitely into seeing what happens next. And I say that without any plans to do, you know, homework on it.
2007-06-11 14:42:42
2.   trainwreck
It was exactly what I expected and that was not a bad thing in this case.
2007-06-11 15:39:12
3.   trainwreck
It reminds me of Takashi Miike's Visitor Q. A stranger appears and becomes a catalyst for change for a dysfunctional family in badly need of healing. Just take out all the weird and disturbing stuff and replace it with surfing.
2007-06-12 12:08:50
4.   kylepetterson
Baby, if you've ever wondered, wondered whatever became of me. I'm living on the air in Cincinnati: Cincinnati, WKRP.

I don't have cable, so that's the best I got. Johnny Fever in Cincinnati.

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