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John from Cincinnati: His Visit: Day One (series premiere)

Posted Jun 11th 2007 2:15AM by Julia Ward
Filed under: OpEd, Episode Reviews



(S01E01) Unlike my esteemed colleagues at various print publications, I did not have access to John from Cincinnati's press screener weeks before the show's broadcast. I would have to write my review within an hour or two after watching the premiere with the rest of America. This is all well and good, but I was a little nervous about what I would make of David Milch's latest outing without some time to reflect. I didn't want my commentary to be mired in superfluous comments about how Ed O'Neill and Rebecca De Mornay are looking these days. This series is drawing on an "everything and the kitchen sink" range of literary and philosophical references. It deserves more from me so I prepared by reading everything that was available – namely the script, interviews with Milch and the early reviews.

Little did I know that all this research would just make my job harder. Here's a taste of what our nation's finest television critics had to say about John from Cincinnati:

"A gigantic mess." - Tim Goodman, SFGate

"Shows like John from Cincinnati are why the good Lord made remote-control clickers." - Tom Shales, The Washington Post

"The premiere episode is almost willfully strange and unlikable." - Alessandra Stanley, NY Times

"Watching HBO's surfing drama John from Cincinnati is like sitting through a bad play at a tiny experimental theater. The dialogue is loud pretentious nonsense signifying nothing but the creative dangers of mimicking Sam Shepard, Edward Albee and Samuel Beckett." - Matthew Gilbert, Boston Globe

"I was beyond bored." - Ed Martin, The Huffington Post

Over half dubbed the show "Driftwood" and most referred to it as a "wipeout." The only person who had anything good to say about it was Heather Havrilesky at Salon.com (subscription required) who called it, "a big, sloppily wrapped gift from heaven itself." Robert Abele of the LA Weekly and Maureen Ryan of the Chicago Tribune were willing to give the show a break but not before describing it as "weird" and "self-indulgent."

Man, I wish I hadn't read those reviews beforehand. I will go ahead and admit it. I am a terrible critic. I am, more often than not, on the side of the artist. I will defend an artist's right to fail, even in the uber-expensive medium of television, before I roundly dismiss someone's blood, sweat and tears with a lame critical barb like "wipeout." I will do everything to try and see something from the artist's point of view before declaring his or her work a failure. (Hell, I might even defend David Chase's giant F-U to the audience tonight, but I'm not that crazy.)

Anyway, I know this is a problem. I know that your real friends are the ones willing to tell you that your ass does, indeed, look fat in those pants and that it was the brave little boy not the cowering villagers who cried, "The Emperor has no clothes." Yes, I need to go back to remedial critics' school.

The early reviews of John from Cincinnati have provoked in me a desire to defend it regardless of its quality – out of both some kind of protective mechanism I feel for artists (damaged, beautiful David Milch in particular) and the desire to be a contrarian. "Maybe, you think it's pretentious because you haven't brushed up on your William James as of late, buddy."

So, that's my great big set of quotation marks around this review. I'm going to be fair, but lenient in my assessment of John from Cincinnati's premiere episode. I'm not going to whip out any crappy surfing puns, and I'll try to avoid talking about how some artists, including Milch, just might need the constraints that networks put on them to be truly great. We're just gonna go with the flow and try to take it easy on our formerly drug-addled friends. It's not their fault Deadwood was taken away from us. It's Chris Albrecht's, and his unhappy fate has already been determined.

So, on with the show. Yosts meet John, magical mystery messiah descended from a long line of literature's touched fools. (You know, the crazy ones are closer to God. The blind truly see.) John meet the Yosts, surfing's crumbling dynasty presided over by the especially crumbly Mitch Yost. There are plenty of other gutter poets and colorful losers ambling around the edges - retired cop Bill, Vietnam Joe, Ramon, lawyer Dickstein and lotto winner Barry.

If you're expecting conventional storytelling and easily identifiable heroes and villains, than yes, you will hate John from Cincinnati. You will hate it for robbing us of Deadwood. You will hate it for being confounding and pretentious. Milch untethered from the conventions of the Western (Deadwood) or cop drama (NYPD Blue) is a Milch too far gone. I, however, didn't hate it. While I wouldn't call it a "gift from heaven," I would call it intriguing and compelling and worthy of an audience.

What Milch does so well is give us a set of eccentric lowlifes, burn-outs and hardened hearts all still fumbling toward some version of grace. Tough, forgotten cops fight back the tears over their dead birds. Resentful fathers and their junkie sons apologize to each other for being dicks. And, everyone regales in the innocence of youth and the purity of the wave. Whether the cast is up to playing the inherent complexities of these characters remains to be seen. The strongest performances came from Bruce Greenwood as Mitch, Ed O'Neill as Bill and Luis Guzman as Ramon. Rebecca De Mornay is either brilliant or completely grating as Cissy Yost. I haven't decided yet. It may take me a couple of weeks to wrap my mind around the choices she's making with Cissy.

The dialogue is typical of Milch - rich and foul and loopy. There are some meaty exchanges and thespian-friendly scenes even if they don't add up to all that cohesive of a whole. Of course, that dialogue belongs in the mouths of some more than others. Some of the scenes with non-actors (and De Mornay) feel forced. The uneven casting may grow to be more of an issue for me than the show's unconventional narrative structure.

And, what to make of the miraculous occurrences on Imperial Beach - levitating patriarchs, resurrecting birds and John's magic pants? John's name is John Monad. Much has been made of the fact that "monad" has multiple, but related meanings - the most primal aspect of God, the basic unit of perceptual reality and the indivisible life essence. I'm not sure it matters much whether John turns out to be an alien or otherworldly or just a nut job. He's there to bring the Yosts a little hope, a little cash and, well, we'll have to wait and see what else he has in store. I'm already cooking up a big, crazy theory about monads, marginality and the miraculous, but I'll save that for some otherworldly graduate thesis. For now, I'm in for the ten episode ride... just get back to work on those Deadwood flicks when you wrap guys, okay?

I was going to go with a "I'd enjoy this more if I were smoking..." poll, but I've opted instead to rely on the voices of America's critical community. So, who's assessment do you find on target? (None, of course, is more important than your own. Add your two cents in the comments section. You in for another week? Feel screwed over by both Davids - Chase and Milch - tonight?)

Which critics' assessment of John from Cincinnati most resembles your own?

Tags: Bruce Greenwood, David Milch, Deadwood, DeMornay, Greyson Fletcher, HBO, John from Cincinnati, John Monad, Kem Nunn, metaphysics, monad, premiere, surf noir, surfing, Surfing Yosts

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