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I Think I Know Who Killed 'John From Cincinnati'

I’ll admit to watching every episode of John From Cincinnati, the beautiful mess of a potentially great show about surfing, heroin, and a syntactically challenged Jesus with beautiful eyes and magic pockets. I mean, I stuck with it ‘til the end, even after it was clear that show mastermind David Milch was either back on heroin himself or just having a laugh … all of which is even less justifiably admitted to when I confess I’d never even seen Deadwood. Or NYPD Blue. Or Hill Street Blues.

So it wasn’t the genius (or the cult) of Milch that kept me going. Months after its cancellation I remained dopily unable to explain my persistent slog through the show, to condescending friends, in speech any clearer than Ed O’Neil’s confessions to his Lazarus-like parrot. So I decided to use this WGA strike time constructively and research the man behind JFC.

Now I’m burning my way through three seasons of Deadwood DVDs. I’ve discovered I fucking love David Milch, as a human and a writer, just as much as the next guy testifying to his brilliance on the DVD extras featurettes. And I’ve discovered that in-house-testimonial-reverence is exactly why John From Cincinnati never stood a chance.

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During my rampant reading of anything and everything related to The Wire, I came across an interview of creator David Simon, by Nick Hornby. Nick inquires how Simon conceptualizes his show, vis a vis theretofore more successful, higher profile HBO series:

The Sopranos and Deadwood—two shows that I do admire—offer a good deal of Macbeth or Richard III or Hamlet in their focus on the angst and machinations of the central characters (Tony Soprano, Al Swearengen). Much of our modern theater seems rooted in the Shakespearean discovery of the modern mind.

[Side note for Wire freaks — Simon proceeds to say the Wire is, instead, indebted to Greek tragedies:

[We are] lifting our thematic stance wholesale from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides to create doomed and fated protagonists who confront a rigged game and their own mortality. The modern mind—particularly those of us in the West—finds such fatalism ancient and discomfiting, I think. We are a pretty self-actualized, self-worshipping crowd of postmoderns and the idea that for all of our wherewithal and discretionary income and leisure, we’re still fated by indifferent gods, feels to us antiquated and superstitious … But instead of the old gods, The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It’s the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no decent reason.

You’re welcome.]

Simon’s spot on in likening Milch to Shakespeare, and not just for Swearengen’s blowjob-soliloquies or psychological trajectories: The man’s years as an academic (Phi Beta Kappa and Summa Cum Laude from Yale, where he won the Tinker Prize in English and later taught literature) have shaped his writing to be uncompromisingly intellectual and, importantly, reliant on subtext. You don’t need David’s Wiki page to tell you he’s a smarty, but it’s only in watching the Deadwood DVD extras (capturing Milch on the set, instructing the actors) that you see how deeply he imbues his scenes with latent meaning. It’s the sort of sewing and lacing that could leave Cliff’s Notes writers extrapolating for years: a flick of a wrist, the tightening of a protagonist’s back, the extinguishing of a cigar — you see Milch give spontaneous and detailed dissertations as to how meaningful these events are, what they signify, how they’re meant to inform the audience.

I love knowing every element of every scene is pivotal, and worthy of analysis. Sometimes I even “get it.” But also it’s clear there’s no fucking way you’re grasping the full expression of Milch’s intentions unless you’re privy to his lecture first-hand … or, like me, you watched the DVD extras. (You should.)

That aside, though, Deadwood wins via its genius dialog: declarative and plot forwarding, at least, while being convoluted, and inventive, and suggestive. Even if you didn’t grasp every last subliminal motivation of the prostitute-slashing Hearst-aide Walcott, for instance, you knew he was a disturbed cocksucker, battling inner demons that ultimately bested him (represented by that time he, whoops, slit three prostitutes’ throats).

D.wood operates on multiple levels, cohesively, with integrity. That’s why you won’t hear a bad word about Milch on the featurettes. But what’s more: Every word of praise comes accompanied by the sparkling eyes of a person testifying to possessing perfectly blind faith.

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Timonty Olyphant (he who plays Seth Bullock, although to me he’ll always be the shirtless Santa Claus-capped pill pusher in Go) reveals in an interview: “When [David] talks, I don’t understand 50% of what he says … but I walk away thinking, we’re gonna win a Nobel Prize!”

That’s telling, and not just in confirming that Timothy Olyphant is as empty-headed a vessel as he is a face-frozen thespian. Timmy’s quote foreshadows HBO’s entire approach to John From Cincy; Deadwood’s success, along with its unquestioning, sycophantic framework, encouraged Milch to really go for it ‘next time.’ And so he pushed even more of his beautiful mind even further into the unspoken (or, the gibberishly spoken).

The result? A gaggle of psychotically blathering surfers and their loved ones, doing shit you just knew was fraught with meaning, man (but really just sounding like a chorus of disassociated bipolar rantings). The audience was left to make sense of a world that was knowable only in the mind of its creator.

Right, that actually may be a poetic distillation of Milch’s world view. But in allowing Milch to play Creator, HBO learned they’ll at least it’ll need someone on the set to play devil’s advocate.

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The beautiful thing is, there will be a “next time.” Milch was creator/writer/producer/God of Cincinnati. He’s got another show coming up with HBO — yes, his third in three years — which he’s developing with friend and NYPD collaborator Bill Clark. Behold, a copilot, a check to his balance. (Also, it’s a return to David’s cop show roots (called Last Of The Ninth, dealing with police corruption in the ‘70s in NYC.) I’m so watching.

Even though John was out in just a season, with no chance to explain itself, HBO’s essentially telling us they’ve got supreme faith in David Milch. I do, too. But I guess I’ll never know Butchie instead.