In short, if Gary Busey were a TV series, he would be "John From Cincinnati." A few viewers may rationalize this anger opera from "Deadwood" creator David Milch and surf novelist Kem Nunn as a crypto-religious masterpiece that's challengingly mysterious. Others, myself included, will only feel assaulted by the bombast. Sitting through three episodes made me feel sad for HBO, which has slotted the "John" premiere after the "Sopranos" finale hoping it will persuade subscribers to keep the pay channel. The show, Sunday at 10, is more likely to send viewers running for Excedrin PM and a pair of foam ear plugs. Good thing "Entourage" and "Big Love" return next week.
The bottom line for me was not the self-importance and auto-eroticism of the writing, but the emptiness of the characters. Burdened with mannered Milchian lines such as "You don't hold onto a bird once it's passed," and "Some things I know and some things I don't," the show's Southern Californians are merely mouthpieces and constructs. I didn't care about a single one of them, not even the pet bird Zippy, who dies and then is reborn to turd madly in his owner's pocket -- as a reminder, no doubt, of being, and nothingness, and re-being, and re-despoiling of beingness, or something.
The focus of the show, and of the border town of Imperial Beach, is the Yost family, three generations of expert surfers. And by surfers, of course, I mean riders on the storm of time and space that is now -- and now -- and now. Anyway, Mitch (Bruce Greenwood) is the grandfather, the legendary surfer whose knee injury has doomed him to a life of profanity. Now he pouts and argues with his wife, Cissy (Rebecca De Mornay ), with whom he has loveless sex. He also thinks he has cancer "right here in my brain" because he feels himself levitating -- I mean, rising above the dirt of this cruddy, damaged world in some kind of holy grace.
