Luck: Season One (2012)

Showrunners: David Milch and Michael Mann

 The death of a few horses behind the scenes led to the eventual cancellation of this show. This cancellation was unfortunate but also very appropriate considering how much this show adored horses. It's about a bunch of people who come together at this horse track because of their admiration and love for horses. Whether or not they are contradicting themselves by being at a race track and also loving horses is not the issue, but it is clear that the makers of this show and the characters are all big horse lovers.

Luck is filled with characters who try so hard not to show any weakness or sentimentality, but it is always the scenes where people are interacting with horses in which emotion, sentimentality, and tenderness come through. This poeticism that comes through is a result of David Milch's great dialogue and Michael Mann's amazing visual eye. I'm not sure if I've ever seen a show better than this from the standpoint of a sensory experience. It proves television does not have to be writer-centric forever, the show is filled with cinematic, visceral, and poetic moments that make sense internally even if they don't always make sense plot-wise. The story can be confusing, it's big, complex and filled with race track vocabulary that made it even more difficult to understand what was going on. This should have been more frustrating, but the show always knew how to make you feel what you need to feel. Like Milch's best show, Deadwood, I suspect the show would have been even better in the second season, maybe all-time great television level, but unfortunately we'll never get to see it happen.

Grade: A-