Brian Van Holt as Butchie Yost, Ed O’Neill as Bill Jacks and Austin Nichols as “John from Cincinnati”

In this case, it’s really television off the radar. David Milch’s “John from Cincinnati” (Sunday nights on HBO) is so bizarre at times — so frustratingly murky and unstable — that the fear isn’t really that it will fail to reach a wide audience. There is clearly no chance of that ever happening. The real anxiety is that it will alienate even the most avid David Milch fans, who are still mourning the loss his last, truncated masterpiece, “Deadwood.”

And in a cruel twist of fate, it actually might come down to a choice between another season of “JC” or fulfilling a promise that Milch and HBO made to wrap up “Deadwood” in two two-hour movies.

Right now, the choice would seem to be a no-brainer. While “Deadwood” was challenging in many ways — from putting poetic language into the mouths of frontier ruffians to presenting moral conflicts that would tear characters and the audience apart — it was grounded in an historical reality and a novelistic sense of character and plot development. Its allegorical power also became fairly clear as the series developed: this frontier town in the 1800s was going through political and communication revolutions that were remarkably resonant with our present-day.

The extreme nature of its violence, sex and language (poetic and otherwise) assured it a marginal place at best on the pop culture spectrum, but it was still a story you could enjoy retelling to friends, while cajoling them to rent the first season.

“JC,” on the other hand, is almost done with its first season, and the audience has little idea of the nature of even the most basic forces propelling the narrative. Yes, a family of surfers — the Yosts — is sorting through a complicated history of dysfunctional relationships, drug abuse, and celebrity. Other that their situation, however, nothing else is clear.

The mysterious and mystical title character has taken on a larger role as the season progressed, moving through many of the characters’ lives simultaneously, displaying superhuman abilities. Whether he’s a “shape-shifter” (which is how one character sees him) or a Christ figure (which his initials and his persistent references to his “Father’s words” imply), the audience is given very few clues.

Some critics, who have otherwise been sympathetic to adventurous TV, have had enough. Heather Havrilesky of Salon has already called it a “wipe-out“:

All of the stuff that worked on “Deadwood” — the odd speech patterns, the strange non sequiturs, the quirky interactions of the community at large — don’t work here nearly as well. When people speak strangely and say absurd things, sometimes, they’re just seem like weirdos. And hey, I’m all for weirdos. But an entire town full of freaks who mill about, without any clear motivations or goals beyond upsetting each other?

But many others are doing what Milch wants them to do: letting go of our traditional expectations of a linear, goal-oriented narrative and appreciating the show on its own, logic-defying terms.

Before I discuss those celebrating the show, though, you might be asking how I know what Milch wants the audience to understand. Well, let me in on the big secret that shouldn’t really be a secret.

Each week, Steve Hawk writes an “Inside the Episode” analysis on the HBO website — and it kind of explains everything.

Hawk is both a writing and surfing consultant to the show, and he’s obviously privy to much of Milch’s conversations and reflections — since he quotes him often and at length. He also took his own detailed notes on the set each day. Learning about how Milch is consistently developing fairly coherent themes as well as how much the show intentionally relies on improvisation is revelatory, but what makes Hawk’s analyses the most worthwhile is simply his own eloquent and enthusiastic response to the show.

He’s a sharp guy, for sure, but he writes in a way that makes you feel that anyone watching the show could get this stuff. And that might be a good definition of a successful critic — one that empowers the readers/watchers to take over his job.

Which is somewhat of an answer to that age-old literary conundrum — if James Joyce needed to produce a cheat sheet so even his friends could understand Ulysses, doesn’t that lessen the power and value of the work? Isn’t it the author’s responsibility to make the meaning of a text accessible to any diligent reader — without external help?

Without delving into a century’s worth of literary theory that tackled that question, my bias is simply to say, yes, a self-contained text is a “better” text. The greatest writing produces — all by itself — a sort of intellectual joy, both fulfilling our visceral needs to connect with characters and places and our higher-level need to construct meaning out of them (or, maybe to understand better their inherent lack of meaning).

Hawk’s commentary, though, might be a good middle ground. He doesn’t write as an authority, but rather as a fan. His “inside” perspective ultimately isn’t about his privileged vantage point — it’s an invitation for everyone else to dig a little deeper.

And, as I noted, fans are doing just that — even though many of them don’t reveal an awareness of Hawk’s guidance. Here’s a quick, ’round-the-web summary of some of the better takes on the show:

First, the responses at Salon to Havrilesky are illuminating. In particular, fuzzo is onto something (I’ve cleaned up the typos):

The intention of John from Cincinnati is mise en scene (I’m referring to the Andrew Sarris definition of the term) first and character-driven plot device second. and it portrays its intent quite well … Instead of using a tried and true plot device to ratchet up expectations and deliver laughs, pathos or thrills, Milch confronts with the mystical; practically daring us to deny its existence. that makes following the proceedings a little more work and a little less play, yet it is in-the-moment and exhilarating work.

Chris Serico at Remote Access is also keeping the faith. Even though he would like more consistency and coherency from episode to episode, he can’t get enough of Ed O’Neill’s portrayal of Bill Jacks and other engagingly quirky side characters.

Drake LeLane at Film.com loves the music on the show — but even better, he makes a very convincing case for how the songs clue us into the larger themes.

And, last but possibly most intriguing, Jessica Price at ARGNet, with the help of other fan sites, has unearthed a wide range of websites — from johnmonad.com to yostclan.com to stinkweedusa.com — that the producers of the show have apparently planted to provide context and clues about the show.

What “The Sopranos” began, “JC” is taking to its, for lack of a better adjective, logical extreme.