Surf Noir

• The Aqua Velvets, “Guitar Noir” (buy here and learn more about the band here)

Or, enough about crap TV, let’s talk about good TV.

There’s a highly entertaining New York Times article about Deadwood creator David Milch, who’s currently working on a new show for HBO called John from Cincinnati. (Hurry there if you’re interested; not sure how long the Times will keep it on the right side of the pay-only wall.)

You don’t need me to tell you that Deadwood is worth seeing, but I will anyway (even though I’ve seen only the first season so far and am still looking forward to the rest). It’s startlingly rich, with a huge cast of vivid characters encompassing all manner of human striving & vanity; it’s built out of dense & energetic language; its story arcs are freewheeling & idiosyncratic. Go read this; Devin puts it better than I could.

Deadwood also has a more compelling antihero than I would have imagined possible – the brothel owner and, um, pillar of the community Al Swearengen, who’s vicious & amoral & dangerous yet also strangely understandable & utterly fascinating. He makes Tony Soprano look pale, emaciated. The Seth Bullock sheriff character ostensibly represents the moral yardstick of Deadwood, but there’s never any doubt that Swearengen is the real centre of the show & the town.

One of the most rightly celebrated scenes (again, in, um, the first season) features Swearengen delivering a kind of soliloquy about his childhood while being, ah, serviced by one of his employees. It shouldn’t work – it should be a showoffy set piece clearly designed to tell you A Genius Wrote This. But it does work, amazingly; when you watch it you believe that every word & every second is actually happening in front of you.

Anyway, John from Cincinnati sounds pretty insane:

The pilot, scheduled for broadcast in the spring, is based on the travails of a mythical first family of surfing.… The story defies television genre-speak, but in literature it would be called surf noir. There is a dysfunctional family viewed through the twin prisms of surfing and heroin addiction, a space alien and a lawyer named Dickstein. It should be mentioned that some characters occasionally levitate.

I for one am intrigued.

I also had to laugh at some of Milch’s highfalutin’ brainstorming; he’s quoted as saying (presumably extemporaneously):

“A dying culture, intuiting that it is dying, postulates an alternative reality: The Indians postulated in the ghost dance that they were impervious to technology, that when a bullet hit them, they went up to heaven. Does any of that sound familiar?”

On the other hand, it’s refreshing & bracing to see someone so infatuated with ideas, so unafraid of being thought pretentious. Milch’s eccentricities have been well documented, probably best in the long New Yorker article that Devin points to, and at this point it feels like there’s a statute on the books that any article about Milch must play up the fact that he writes flat on his back in a room full of people. Still, he is one funny, interesting cat.