Nancy Franklin's review for John From Cincinnati ran in the June 18, 2007, issue of the New Yorker.

You know how when you use a big bill to buy a train ticket or stamps from a vending machine and unexpectedly get a handful of Susan B. Anthony dollars as change you think, Oh, come on, this is no good—why didn’t the machine warn me? I’m never going to be able to get rid of these—

 wants them. I imagine that similar thoughts must have gone through the collective head of HBO upon delivery of David Milch’s “John from Cincinnati,” the series that began minutes after “The Sopranos” ended, two Sundays ago. Audiences, too, may have recoiled when they watched the first episode, and thought, Hey, don’t try to pawn this off on me!

HBO, on the strength of “The Sopranos,” “Sex and the City,” “The Wire,” “Deadwood,” “Entourage,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” “Six Feet Under,” and a number of documentaries, has, with good reason, been regarded for almost a decade as the channel that can do no wrong. Because our expectations are now so high, and have so frequently been met and then exceeded, it’s easy to be unduly disappointed and judgmental when a series isn’t everything we want it to be. But it’s not fair to think of HBO as HB Oh No every time a show flatlines. The channel itself seems worried at the moment, though; it aired a nervously jokey promo before the last episode of “The Sopranos,” using the line “Endings make room for beginnings,” and reassuring us that it has “more new series than ever before” coming up.

Who wouldn’t be worried, with “John from Cincinnati” taking over as the channel’s flagship for the next few months, in the Sunday-at-nine slot? A drama about surfing and spirituality, it takes place in the gritty border town of Imperial Beach, California, a stone’s throw from Tijuana—a locale where Kem Nunn, who co-created “John,” set one of the novels that have earned his work the term “surf noir.” “John” centers on three generations of a fictional famous surfing family, the Yosts, and is as stunningly dull as Milch’s previous series “NYPD Blue” and “Deadwood” were brilliant and penetrating. Mitch and Cissy Yost (Bruce Greenwood and Rebecca De Mornay) are the family elders; Mitch left the world of competitive surfing behind twenty years ago, because of a knee injury. Their son, Butchie (Brian Van Holt), who, we’re told, revolutionized surfing when he was younger, stopped riding because he became a drug addict. Butchie’s son, Shaun (Greyson Fletcher, the real-life scion of a surfing dynasty, whose grandparents, Herbie and Dibi Fletcher, are consulting producers of “J. from C.”), is a sweet and beautiful thirteen-year-old with long blond hair, unsoured by life and a phenom in his own right, who lives with his hippieish but responsible grandparents. What tension there is—there’s a lot of shouting and swearing and scowling in the series, but not much tension—is generated by Shaun’s desire to go pro and get an agent and sponsors.

In interviews and in his work, Milch expounds upon his great subject: the oneness of things, the connectedness and indivisibility of all life. This trope ran like a vein of ore through “Deadwood,” without calling much attention to itself. This time around, the theme has become viral, killing everything in its path. On Craig Ferguson’s late-night talk show a couple of weeks ago, when Milch was asked what “John from Cincinnati” was about, he said, “If God were trying to reach out to us, and if he felt a certain urgency about it . . . that’s what it’s about.” Going deeper, he went on, “The wave . . . is the only visible embodiment of what physicists tell us all matter is composed of, which is particles held together by some kind of magnetic or molecular force. And that’s what makes the waves move.” After Ferguson did a little hostly vamping in response, Milch added, “And if God were trying to reach out to us, and teach us something about the deepest nature of matter, he might use some drugged-out surfers.”

It may be that God is trying to reach out and touch the Yosts, who could use a little redemption, through the presence of John (Austin Nichols), a clean-cut oddball who turns up at the beach one day when Mitch is out riding the waves (he still surfs, though always alone and evidently without joy) and whose first words—addressed to Luke Perry, who plays a surfing agent named Linc—are “The end is near.” (John’s last name is Monad—the word Leibniz used to encompass the concept of eternal, irreducible simplicity.) Or it may just be that John is touched. He speaks only when spoken to, and mostly parrots what people say to him, though he seems to have something invested in Mitch’s getting “back in the game.” In response to most questions, about where he’s from, who he is, why he’s here, John says, “Some things I know, and some things I don’t.” Butchie soon takes the mysterious stranger under his wing, since he seems to have lots of cash to subsidize Butchie’s drug habit. Irritated, as many viewers will be, by John’s “some things I know” mantra, Butchie instructs him to say, “ ‘I don’t know, Butchie,’ instead”—and John obeys, to the letter, saying that phrase over and over in response to everyone’s questions. John may be God’s rep, and catchy as an idea, but as a character he’s an overdose of sleeping pills.

In an episode in the last season of “The Sopranos,” when Tony is in the hospital, he takes part in a conversation with a fellow-patient, a scientist (played by Hal Holbrook) who talks about a theory of physics that has to do with the way all matter is connected (see Schrödinger); the conversation grows out of a boxing match that a group of patients are watching on TV. In other words, the ideas come out of the drama. In “John,” you get the feeling that Milch is using the characters as hooks on a pegboard, on which to hang his philosophical wares. The writing in the series just has no pleasure in it, not as it hits the ear or in terms of getting us any closer to these people and their problems, mundane or existential. Butchie, living in a derelict motel, is semi-feral—mangy, antisocial, and narrowly focussed on his own survival. A character is compelling when he’s becoming a junkie or trying to stop being a junkie—but an active junkie is never compelling, because he’s not struggling with anything. Milch and Nunn haven’t brought out the best in any of their performers: Van Holt barks his lines, Greenwood speaks in a monotone, De Mornay is wooden (and, at forty-seven, a little too young to play the grandmother of a teenager), Perry does a lot of squinting, and Nichols is a nonentity. Keala Kennelly, who plays Kai, a surf-shop employee and a friend of the family, isn’t a professional actor—she’s one of the top women big-wave surfers in the world. But she happens not to be much of a performer and, in the first three episodes at least, we never get to see her surf. It’s a lose-lose situation. The supporting cast features several ubiquitous character actors, who distract by their very familiarity. (The actual surfing in the show is shot well, but there isn’t much of it. Be sure to savor the opening-credits montage of old footage of longboards and men in the shorter bathing suits of several decades ago; it’ll make your gut tingle, and remind you that awesomely big fun can also lead to a feeling of oneness and connection. The credits blow the show, with its endlessly tedious dialogue, out of the water.)

What might turn out to work in “John” is whatever Milch can do with the complexities of the setting he’s chosen. In the first episode, while John and Linc (as in “link,” as in we’re all connected) are talking, we see a couple of blurry shapes darting through the brush—they’re Mexicans who have just run across the border. And when Mitch finishes surfing that day and is pouring fresh water over himself before getting into his car (and levitating, but let’s not get into that: you’ve already seen the image a hundred times in the promos and on posters all over town), we see a huge, hulking structure in the background, a shot that comes as a visual shock to anyone who isn’t familiar with this region: it looks like a giant spaceship. In fact, it’s the Tijuana bullring; in Nunn’s novel “Tijuana Straits,” the main character observes that it could pass for “the mother ship of some extraterrestrial and conquering race, settled there to survey its holdings.” Milch talks about being interested in borders (not in a strictly Lou Dobbs way but in a metaphysical way), yet so far he has done little to explore that interest.

It’s maddening to see a show this bad from someone so talented, but that’s how it works when you’re a real artist, and that’s how it should work. The person who creates a “Deadwood” is also probably going to make a “John from Cincinnati” one day. If you let him. Networks don’t let that happen; HBO does. It takes risks. Milch, who openly and frequently talks about his history of multiple addictions, has made much of the grace of second chances. In that spirit, I’m willing to believe that the series will improve, but not willing enough to stick around to see if it does.

"DEAD IN THE WATER," NEW YORKER REVIEW FOR "JOHN FROM CINCINNATI" (2007)

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