"DO YOU HAVE anything stronger than Red Bull?" asks David Milch as he ambles into a convenience store in Imperial Beach, California, and begins scanning the aisles.

"Try the red can in the cooler in the back," the guy at the cash register says, and Milch soon finds a drink called CL-One and holds it up in the air.

"This is the worst thing you got?" he calls to the cashier. The guy nods, and Milch takes out three cans. "Now you're talking." He buys the drinks and asks for his change in lottery scratchers.

One of television's most visionary and successful writers and producers, Milch is in this funky beach town, which borders the even funkier Tijuana, Mexico, to shoot his new HBO series, John from Cincinnati. It's still early on this brisk March morning, and Milch is looking for something to pull him through the long day ahead. He'll be coaching actors, writing bits of new script, hashing out details with the director, and even schmoozing with neighborhood residents hanging around the set. Milch, a large-framed man dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt, is the rare Hollywood big shot you might mistake for a regular guy. But John from Cincinnati is anything but regular. Coming right on the heels of Deadwood, the controversial postmodern western Milch created for HBO, the unconventional seaside drama is Milch's biggest gamble yet.

The show, which debuts June 10, revolves around three generations of Yosts, a family of SoCal surfers with more than a few issues. Mitch Yost (played by Bruce Greenwood) is the pater- familias, an embittered surfing legend whose competitive career ended early after he injured a knee. Mitch runs a surf shop with his wife, Cissy (Rebecca De Mornay), who mocks and snarls at his mix of self-pity and Zen awareness. Their son, Butchie (Brian Van Holt), is another faded surf star; he has a serious thing for heroin, as did Milch for many years—he was literally riding high during much of NYPD Blue, the 12-season hit he created with producer Steven Bochco in the early nineties. The third-generation Yost is Butchie's son, Shaun (Greyson Fletcher), a hot-shot teen surfer who lives with his grandparents and is being pursued by a shady surf-company owner (Luke Perry) whose scheming knows no bounds.

The wild card, as if the Yosts weren't wild enough, is John (Austin Nichols), a bizarre stranger who shows up on the beach and signs on for surfing lessons with Butchie. John makes clichéd oracular pronouncements ("The end is near"), tends to robotically repeat what's said to him (including the idea that he may be from Cincinnati), and surfs effortlessly the first time he tries. Milch keeps you guessing: Is John an alien? Jesus Christ? A brain-damaged savant? Throw in a thuggy, opera-loving heroin dealer from Hawaii, a lottery winner who buys the spectacularly decrepit Snug Harbor Motel (home to several of the show's characters), and an ex-cop who raises birds in his living room, plus a plotline that includes levitation, resurrection, and medical miracles.

Now that's stronger than Red Bull.

Zany and profound, John from Cincinnati is The X Files meets Six Feet Under meets Twin Peaks, with surfboards and a dollop of Thomas Pynchon. Which makes it quirkier than anything HBO has ever bankrolled. No one involved would talk specifics about the budget (Carolyn Strauss, president of HBO Entertainment, referred to the show as "pricey"), but the fact that the first of its ten episodes will air in the hot slot following the series finale of The Sopranos suggests that the network has lots of chips riding on Milch's latest venture. And one of the most surprising and endearing qualities is that its depiction of surfing is spot-on.

From sixties beach-party flicks that feature Annette Funicello posing on a board like she's walking a tightrope, feet pointed forward rather than sideways, to Patrick Swayze standing on the beach in Point Break and announcing that he's "waiting for my set" (true surfers wait for a lull), Hollywood has mangled surfing in every which way. A character may be a regular-foot surfing a right break in one frame, and in the next he's a goofy-foot on a left. Dialogue usually devolves into one-word sentences like "Rad," "Dude," or "Gnarly." Baywatch producers cast Kelly Slater—to the world champ's lasting humiliation—as Jimmy Slade, who in one episode battles an octopus that lives in a cave and collects lost surfboards. And Blue Crush may have given female surfers a little respect in the water, but onshore it was still a ditzy melodrama. At best, Hollywood presents entertaining caricatures of archetypes; see Sean Penn's Jeff Spicoli, who seems stoked more by the stinky green bud than the barreling green room.

Milch, a 62-year-old native of Buffalo, New York, has never surfed and has no intention of learning now. Who'd have guessed that of all the outsiders who've portrayed the sport on the big and small screens, he would be the one to grok it?