I DON'T KNOW, BUTCHIE, INSTEAD: A troubled television savant we all love creates a different kind of show with a cultish audience, then a second show that sets a high bar for quality but that implodes in network politics. He launches a third show, and though some of the characters and many of the actors are familiar, they seem lighter, more accidental, transported into a more trivial setting.
After one episode, it's way too soon to know whether John from Cincinnati is David Milch's Studio 60. It has many of the elements -- as in earlier Milch fare, a character plumbs the depths of an addiction in the opening episode and others struggle with abandonment issues; as with the Sorkin Family Players, Milch employs repeat players, here Luis Guzman, Austin Nichols, Willie Garson, and soon, Garret Dillahunt (whose Wolcott in the second season of Deadwood, I'll say for the millionth time, remains the high-water mark for televised acting); as with Sorkin, the star of the show when it really gets going is the highly mannered dialogue, in Milch's case a brittle, tangled patois of halting misdirection.
And, like Studio 60, JFC (initials, incidentally, of a religious figure that Al Swearingen frequently invoked) will, or would, suffer from an unfair comparison. A sketch comedy show just can't match the gravity of the West Wing, and the trials of a surfing family squandering its talent just aren't as thematically compelling as the dirty struggle to build order at the edge of civilization. I say "would suffer," though, because, unlike Studio 60, I don't think JFC is trying just to recapture the magic of its predecessor. It's too early to know what the point is (after one episode, I have no clue except that it involves levitation and an echolalic mystic), and it's way too early to pass judgment. I hope I'll enjoy finding out. If the improbable discovery that Ed O'Neill can deliver Milchese is any indication, I just may.
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