Movie Box Review

On virtually any network in America, the discovery that a hugely expensive new series--stocked with the highest-caliber talent, preceded by a multi-million dollar marketing campaign--had been watched in its debut by little more than a million people, and that fewer than half a million of those were younger than 50 years old, would be considered close to a disaster.

On HBO, LUCK was instantly renewed for a second season.

And this is how the pay-cable business is different from both network and basic cable.  Luck may never be watched by many people (in fact, it was watched by less than half as many 18-49 year olds than even SHAMELESS, airing at the same time over at Showtime).  But since HBO doesn't sell advertising, it doesn't really care about the number of eyeballs a series gets.  What it cares about is prestige and mystique.  As Ari Emanuel noted in a recent NY Times article, HBO is one of the iconic brands in all of television, and that's because it stands for the kind of high quality that no self-respecting TV subscriber (around 29 million of them, currently) feels he or she can be without--whether they watch the shows or not.  The titles alone tell the tale:  The Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood, Band of Brothers, Boardwalk Empire, The Pacific, and on and on  (HBO also stands for a great deal of sex and violence, which is another quiet selling point, but that's another story.)  No one watched HBO's recent adaptation of Mildred Pierce, but Kate Winslet swept awards season (and the show probably would have too if it weren't for Downton Abbey).  No one watched In Treatment, which sometimes measured a 0.1 in 18-49s, and it ran for 3 years.  And if all the people who now claim they watched The Wire actually did, it would have been a blockbuster instead of a show lucky to stay on the air.

Luck, with its super-charged talent roster of David Milch, Michael Mann, Dustin Hoffman, Nick Nolte, and many other classy names (Michael Gambon!  Catherine Keener!), has a home at HBO for as long as it stays elite.

In the next few weeks, episodes of Luck will air opposite the Super Bowl, the Grammys and the Oscars... and starting in Week 3, its competition will include THE WALKING DEAD, the most popular scripted show on cable.  Who knows how low Luck's ratings will go.  Which is to say, by March, HBO might extend that renewal for 2 or 3 more years.  

HBO, wanting to give its high-profile David Milch/Michael Mann/Dustin Hoffman/Nick Nolte horseracing drama LUCK the best possible promotional platform, premiered the pilot as a "special preview" following what turned out to be the shocking season finale of BOARDWALK EMPIRE.  The first part of the plan worked:  Boardwalk scored a terrific (by its standards) 1.3 rating in 18-49s and 3 million total viewers, a season high.  But the audience fled at the prospect of Luck:  the 18-49 number plummeted 70% to a 0.4, and the total audience figure wasn't much better, down to about 1.1 million viewers.

This is pay-cable, where the standards are different:  Luck's 0.4 isn't all that much lower than the 0.5 Homeland did on Showtime, where that spectacularly good show is considered a big hit, even though it loses almost half of its Dexter lead-in.  Reviews, awards, and general "buzz" are critical for these networks.  (Put another way:  they don't care if subscribers actually watch the shows, as long as they feel like they should be watching.)  Still, Luck is a very expensive show to produce, and it won't have a lead-in again like the one Boardwalk Empire gave it on Sunday night.  In the parlance of the show:  if you're putting down a future bet on the long-time viability of Luck, make sure you're getting long odds.

The TV auteur David Milch got rich by co-creating (with Steven Bochco) NYPD Blue, but he's probably most beloved for creating Deadwood.  Deadwood, while never a giant hit--it ran only 36 episodes on HBO, and never had a proper ending--was a legendary feat of writing, a genuine creation that combined the bottom-up construction of a frontier town's entire populace with spectacularly eloquent and profane dialogue that was almost Shakespearean in its scabrous, multi-layered beauty.  (AMC's Hell On Wheels is an increasingly dull attempt to reconfigure something like the tone of Deadwood for a broader audience.)  With the new LUCK, which HBO previewed after the Boardwalk Empire season finale, prior to its regular run beginning January 29, Milch turns to a subject much closer to home (perhaps a bit too close):  a Los Angeles-area horseracing track and its denizens. 

It's not exactly a secret that Milch is himself a devotee of the racing world, and his expertise is all over the Luck pilot.  Every detail feels right, from the strategies of self-described "degenerate gamblers" trying to nail a multi-million dollar Pick 6 wager, to the games played by trainers trying to keep the buzz down and the odds high on their horses, to the politics and legal considerations of horse ownership.  As in Deadwood, all levels of the track's universe are covered with an almost obsessive degree of detail.  This devotion is matched by Milch's partner (and sometime enemy combatant) on the project, director Michael Mann, a filmmaker himself famed for his insistence on absolute fidelity to accuracy.  With Mann behind the camera, the race sequences in Luck's pilot are as good as, if not better than, anything previously seen on film.  Mann had tiny cameras on the starting gate, the jockeys, the horses themselves, and who knows where else; the gung-ho immediacy of the editing places viewers into the vortex of a race, as it's happening, with spectacular clarity.

There is a sense in which Luck, or at least its pilot, is like a show about Star Wars put together by sci-fi geeks.  It's so immersed in its own knowledge and sometimes arcane perfectionism that there isn't always room for mere viewers.  The Luck pilot avoids convention to the point of eccentricity.  Its theoretical main character and certainly the one played by its biggest star, Dustin Hoffman, is gambler Chester "Ace" Bernstein.  Ace is released from a 3-year prison term as the show begins, but he probably appears for no more than 10 minutes in the pilot, and apart from one scene with a past and possibly future colleague, he interacts almost exclusively with Gus (Dennis Farina), his driver and right hand.  Ace is forbidden to take part in track activities due to his criminal conviction, so he's set up a cover story by which Gus appears to have "won" a fortune in Las Vegas, permitting him to "buy" a prime racehorse that's actually owned by Ace. 

The horse is being trained by Escalante (John Ortiz), a canny schemer.  Escalante's tricks are known well enough to the degenerate gambler group (Kevin Dunn, Jason Gedrick, Ian Hart, Richie Coster) that the smartest--but perhaps least responsible--among them (Gedrick) dares in their Pick 6 wager to bet only Escalante's long-shot horse in one of the races.  Meanwhile, and for now almost completely separate from all this, is another unknown but wildly promising horse being nurtured toward his racing debut by an owner known only as The Old Man (Nick Nolte).

That name tells you another potential problem with Luck, and it's one to which both Milch and Mann are prone:  intense self-seriousness.  (Lest we forget, Milch followed Deadwood with John From Cincinnati, one of the true WTF television series of our time.)  Nolte delivers elliptical, visionary speeches to and about the horse and his history, steeped in seen-em-come-and-seen-em-go wisdom.  Nolte also doesn't meaningfully interact with anyone else in the pilot, and as great as Nolte is, a little of his isolated lyrical speechifying will go a long way.

More than most pilots, Luck's leaves a great deal unresolved about just what its series will be.  Rather than ingratiate itself as an ordinary pilot would, Luck stakes out its vibrant but in many ways obscure territory and invites viewers to stay or leave.  The show has superb skill, a marvelous cast (apart from those noted, Jill Hennessey, Michael Gambon, Joan Allen, and Richard Kind appear briefly or are promised in future episodes) and utter knowledge of its millieu.  The question is whether it will care to join all of those for a trifecta of captivating storytelling, or leave us to watch in frustration from the cheap seats.  That outcome will be known in a few weeks.  For now:  hold all tickets.