HBO’s “Luck” – The Return of The Milch

David Milch is one of my favorite creators in all of television.  He’s the man who brought us Deadwood and the criminally underrated John from Cincinnati.  Further back, his collaboration with Steven Bochco, NYPD Blue, changed primetime drama.  He’s got one of the most unique and identifiable voices in TV, and his name on a project is enough to get me on board all by itself.  His new HBO series, Luck, begins on Sunday.  Based on his past work, I wanted this horseracing drama to be the best thing ever.  The pilot, taken as a single unit, is seriously flawed but also occasionally brilliant.

In The Black Diamond, spunkybuddy Larry Young wrote there are two kinds of stories ‘stranger comes to town’ and ‘just trying to get home’.  Great TV pilots almost always fall into one of these two types, especially when you expand the definition of the former to include ‘first day of work’.  Deadwood had Seth Bullock and Sol Starr arriving in town.  LOST, well, that was people trying to get home.  Oz, The Office, Homicide, most of the best, series-defining pilots follow this formula.  But in TV, sometimes you get a pilot that’s only great in retrospect.  Specifically, The Wire and Mad Men spring to mind – both seem to be “day in the life” episodes that end on a cheap irony, but once you get a few episodes in, the pilot gets better.  The Wire in particular seemingly ends its first episode by making a tired point about the drug war – but the murder of a witness isn’t supposed to stand for something larger.  It’s a specific plot point that’s followed up in the next episode, and eventually forms the spine of the first season.  In Luck, nobody comes to town and nobody’s trying to get home, at least that we can tell.  As a result, it doesn’t compare to Deadwood’s pilot as an individual episode.  But there’s something there, and it might be a Wire-esque setting of the stage.  Of course, you can’t tell that’s happened until you’re well into the season, which makes the decision to run a preview of the pilot a month early kind of baffling.  There isn’t anything really propulsive about it, none of the “What’s going to happen next?” that you got from the first episode of, say, LOST.  But that’s not insurmountable.  I mean, tell me how the first episode of The Sopranos ended.  I’ve watched the series probably ten times and I couldn’t tell you. 

It’s probably appropriate that Luck doesn’t explode out of the gate, given the setting.  It takes place almost entirely at a horse racing track and its surroundings.  And if you know nothing about horse racing, like me, you’d better learn fast.  Milch doesn’t have time to explain things.  And that’s fine, given that John from Cincinnati was about a family of surfers, an also a mysterious stranger who might be the Messiah, an alien, or a sentient radio signal.  (Seriously, that show was amazing.)  But so much of the plot actually involves the specifics of betting on horses.  You can still track the story, but some of it’s kind of baffling.  (What is a Pick Six?  And why doesn’t everybody do it all the time, since the payoff is immense?)  I appreciate when TV forces me to learn, so I assume by the end of the season I’ll be immersed in off-track betting.

The pilot throws a lot of characters at us, which is a total Milch move.  There’s Ace Bernstein (Dustin freaking Hoffman!), who’s fresh out of jail.  The specifics are fuzzy, but it’s something gambling related and he seems to have taken the fall for a lot of other people.  His driver (the great Dennis Farina) has to serve as his front in all manners related to horse ownership.  The two of them have some excellent scenes, and Farina’s character in particular is so perfectly defined in his first few lines of dialogue.  They’re largely unconnected to the plot of the episode, though.

Mainly, the story focuses on a group of four gamblers who end up hitting the big jackpot of 2.7 million dollars, and this is where it would have been helpful to understand how horseracing works.  (It seemed like the worst possible outcome was a $48,000 payout on an eight-hundred dollar bet, and because everybody in the world isn’t crazy rich, I know that can’t actually be the case.)  Because there’s so much going on, including a horse prostate exam, we don’t really get to know the central characters as well as we should.  Their interactions reveal enough about them to get you to the end, but we legitimately don’t know if this money will be good or bad for them because we don’t really know who they are.  Previews indicate that one of them (Jerry, played by Jason Gedrick) has a self-destructive streak, but we don’t see that here. 

What got me through were some isolated moments of brilliance.  Richard Kind is amazing as he turns his big mouth comedy to pure anger.  There’s real drama in the actual races, and the scene where an injured horse is put down is devastating.  There’s enough that I want to know more about the characters; since it’s such a small community, almost every one of them has history with everybody else, and we just see tantalizing glimpses.  But that’s because I know David Milch’s work – I know that they have backstories and that there’s a reason why somebody might use a strange choice of words here and there or why there’s visible discomfort between some characters.  If I hadn’t come into this as a fan of Deadwood and John, I don’t know that anything in this first episode would have won me over to come back again.  Milch will deliver, but given that Deadwood, as popular as it seems to be now, was cancelled after three seasons and John after just one, I don’t know that appealing to hardcore Milch fans is a move that guarantees longevity.

It’s worth noting that the first episode is gorgeous.  It’s the best-looking thing that director Michael Mann has shot in years.  Hopefully he remains a presence on the show to maintain a visual style, instead of pulling a Scorsese.  (He directed the pilot of Boardwalk Empire and then disappeared, leaving only his producer credit to remember him by.)  I’m not good at expressing why something is visually appealing, so I’m faltering here, but it’s very striking.

I’m only now noticing that I can talk at length about the pilot without mentioning any women.  While there are female characters, they’re on the periphery so far.  But once again, this is Milch.  He gave us Joanie Stubbs, Alma Garrett, and “Mother of God Cass/Kai” (Does anybody get my John from Cincinnati references?).  I have every confidence that the women we see in the first episode will turn into fully realized characters.  But again, that’s me bringing my experience to the table – a new viewer without my emotional attachment would have no reason to do the same.

It’s not an instant classic of a premiere, but I suspect it’s going to be the first chapter of a fantastic Season One box set.  Hopefully, Luck will get its footing quickly so that it doesn’t turn out to be a Complete Series set.

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