John from Cincinnati Baffles, Big Love Takes Us In
You'd never call HBO's daring twists on family drama (from
The Sopranos to
Six Feet Under) ordinary.
John from Cincinnati (Sundays, 9 pm/ET), the story of a surfing dynasty whose fortunes are transformed by a brush with magic, is destined to be one of HBO's most polarizing departures. It rides a wave of idiosyncratic surrealism that may baffle, annoy and frustrate as many viewers as it enchants, amuses and mesmerizes.
For now, count me in the former camp. The first three episodes of this peculiar series bored me silly with its pretentious mannerisms, and I can't help thinking that many HBO subscribers will tune in and wonder: They dropped Deadwood for this? Still, it's hard to bet against a talent like David Milch (Deadwood's creator and cocreator of John), who's clearly marching to his own visionary beat. Deadwood took half a season to kick into gear, and maybe there's more here than painfully precious quirkiness.
The strong cast is led by Bruce Greenwood and Brian Van Holt as father and son Mitch and Butchie Yost, legendary former surfers, the dad felled by injury and the son by drug abuse. Mitch's wife (a shrill Rebecca De Mornay) is pushing Butchie's son into the family game, and into this situation comes John (Austin Nichols), a wanderer who seems more from Mars than Ohio. He's less a character than a device: endlessly parroting what others say, unable even to use the bathroom without guidance. Is he an idiot? A prophet? An alien? Upon John's arrival, miracles like levitation and resurrection occur without warning or explanation.
Whether you find John, and John, fascinating or tiresome is up to you. Surf with caution.
By comparison, the second season of HBO's equally offbeat polygamist saga, Big Love (Mondays, 9 pm/ET), crackles with high drama, suspenseful twists, unexpected humor and emotion. In other words, a story. As we watch overwhelmed family man Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton) and his three wives (Jeanne Tripplehorn, Chloë Sevigny and Ginnifer Goodwin, all terrific) contend with multiple spiraling crises, it gets more entertaining by the episode.
"There are four of us in this marriage, Bill," warns Nicki (Sevigny) as fellow wife Barb (Tripplehorn) reels after being exposed as a polygamist in public, an incident that could harm Bill's business. The tangled bonds of husband and sister-wives only get messier after an attempted poisoning on the compound run by Nicki's sinister father (deliciously creepy Harry Dean Stanton), whose underage bride-to-be is having second thoughts.
No hesitation here. Big Love is one of the summer's big must-sees.
