HBO

It's supposed to happen with every forgotten genre: a blockbuster, a culture awoken, and a bunch more just like it. It's effective. And while the Coen brothers' success in remaking True Grit might not guarantee any Golden Globes on Sunday, one thing's for sure: we're going to see a lot more Westerns in the next few years.

To get a sense of what those movies might look like, we caught up with the creator of the last great Western, Deadwood, which — like too many great genre masterpieces of the last decade — was actually on TV. Not that there hasn't been talk of a big-screen coda for his masterpiece of Shakespearean eloquence (give or take a "cocksucker") since it was cancelled in 2008. "I don't know that the last word has been said on the subject," Milch told us this week during a break from his new HBO series, Luck (more on that later). "I still nourish the hope that we're going to get to do a little more work in that area."

Thing is, despite having thoroughly researched the lawless days of the last gold rush, Milch is no scholar of the Western. He hasn't even seen True Grit. He does, however, profess great admiration for the Coens' work, particularly the fact that their sensibility, like his, doesn't change with the scenery. And that may say a lot more about the future of our culture — our flaws and our stories may outlast our successes and our remakes — than any script doctor with a sidearm and an eyepatch. And that future might just start in your living room.

"It's a more open-ended medium, and you have fewer people pissing in your ear," Milch says of his predilection for the small screen. "I try to do the story the way I feel the story should be done, and how that folds in to whatever larger sorts of categories or questions is really none of my business."

In the 1980s and '90s, Milch made his name on Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue, big-business cop shows without good guys and bad guys — just complex human being making sense of the chaos — that paved the way to the modern age of intelligent, novelistic TV. No David Milch, no Wire.

He first approached HBO with the idea of a series set in the time of Emperor Nero, without realizing the network had already green-lit Rome. Asked if he could explore the same themes in a different world, Milch said, Why not? Rome became the American West; the Christian Cross and its promise of salvation became gold. The constant was society's organization around a single illusion. "The extent to which the truths of a story engage," Milch says, "it's because they are universal truths rather than confined by any particular setting or time frame."

The setting of his next show isn't so arbitrary. Scheduled to air later this year on HBO, Luck takes place in the world of horse racing, which Milch knows only too well. "When I was a kid," he says, "my dad used to take me out to the race track and so many formative experiences have to do with associations like that. My relationship with the track was, I would say, at least fractionally as complicated as my relationship with my old man. So it kept me coming back."

The organizing illusion in Luck is the notion that a horse crossing the finish line before another can truly change a man's life. As with Deadwood, the show's characters include all the men and women even peripherally invested in that illusion: jockeys, owners, trainers, low-lifes, misfits, criminals both petty and grand — notably Chester "Ace" Bernstein, played by a triumphant Dustin Hoffman. Milch's world of horse racing is different from his cops-and-robbers past, and not because the jockey genre is currently limited to, like, Seabiscuit. Because Deadwood is much the same, too — every man for himself, as long as every man agrees it's a prize worth winning.

Watching the Michael Mann-directed pilot, it's hard not see Hoffman as the equivalent of Deadwood's Al Swearengen: a deeply flawed, admittedly destructive man happy not to play by the rules, but ultimately more decent than he'd liked to admit.

But Milch isn't out to repeat himself, or please the fans of his previous shows.

"To think in terms of what the effect of a story is going to be as opposed to trying to discover its inner logic, is one of the fundamental dangers in the process," he says. "I'm just going to try and hit the ball straight and we'll see what field it turns out to be on."

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