Surf's up, but interest in "John from Cincinnati" is ebbing

WKRP's Les Nessman is no longer the weirdest thing to come out of southern Ohio.

  That distinction belongs to the title character in “John from Cincinnati,” the off-the-charts vanity project from David Milch, who gave up his other HBO series, “Deadwood,” to work on this. A truly baffling series about surfing, screwed-up families and miracles, “John from Cincinnati” airs its fourth episode at 8 p.m. CT Sunday on HBO, and shows no signs of emerging from its self-indulgent aura of mystery.

For three weeks now, Milch (pictured here on the "Deadwood" set) has been walking us through a menagerie of oddball characters, created by himself and novelist Kem Nunn, who co-exist uneasily with each other on Imperial Beach, not far from the Mexican border. There's the onetime champion surfer Mitch Yost (Bruce Greenwood), now a grumpy and aloof patriarch who has just learned he can levitate; Mitch's strangely embittered spouse Cissy (Rebecca De Mornay), who gets arrested for throwing canned goods at a grocery store employee; their disappointment of a son, Butchie (Brian Van Holt), who was headed for surfing glory before drugs wiped him out; and Butchie's son, Shaun (Greyson Fletcher, offspring of a real-life surfing dynasty), a gifted golden child whose doe-eyed innocence and marvelous board skills are supposed to mitigate the hatefulness of the grown-ups around him during their not infrequent screaming matches.

  Then there's John (Austin Nichols), a young stranger who wanders onto the beach one day and says, “Mitch Yost should get back in the game.” And: "The end is near." John seems at first to be some kind of well-groomed soothsayer. But to our great frustration, the next three hours John is more mimic than mystic, as he keeps repeating things he overhears other people are saying. “I got my eyes on you … I have to sell it … The line forms on Butchie's left!”   If this random assortment of bon mots makes no sense to you, then welcome to my world. And I haven't even poured on the heavy perfume of scatology that seems to waft from everything Milch does these days. “John from Cincinnati” is as relentlessly foul-mouthed as “Deadwood” was, but in the absence of any real character or story development on this show, the language just seems gratuitous.

  All of which is driving viewers to distraction. In her widely-read trashing of “John from Cincinnati” in The New Yorker, Nancy Franklin wrote, “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.”

  Actually, a network once did allow it to happen. About a decade ago, CBS signed up Milch and his “NYPD Blue” collaborator Steven Bochco to create an edgy, TV-MA-rated cop show called “Brooklyn South.” It opened with a shockingly violent, 10-minute scene where a peaceful city street exploded into a shooting gallery. The show kind of went downhill from there, and didn't get renewed.

  Still, Franklin's point is well-taken. HBO has a history of urging its producers to become auteurs, to cross that Rubicon that separates the merely commercial TV types from the telegeniuses that make HBO HBO. Alan Ball, when developing “Six Feet Under,” was told his depictions of a family that lived in the funeral home it owned weren't creepy enough. And of course, there was the recent memory of David Chase ending his show, “The Sopranos,” by switching Tony off in mid-scene.

  But even given HBO's reputation for slow-simmering, strange-tasting stews, I am developing no taste for Milch's latest concoction. I came up with a four-episodes rule after my late colleague, John Higgins, advised me in the spring of 1999 to keep watching those “Sopranos” screener tapes. “It really gets going in the fourth hour,” Higgins said, and he was right. Well, it's week four for “John from Cincinnati,” and unless I get a little resolution on this John character -- is he touched by an angel, or simply touched -- I'm going to have to move on. And I suspect I won't be alone.