As you probably know, especially if you watched even a fleeting moment of it, David Milch’s HBO surfer drama John from Cincinnati was the worst, most exasperating TV series ever aired. Nevertheless, we watched every episode during its three-month run, hoping that at some point a light would come on and reveal a shred of plot hidden somewhere in all that thick Milch scripture. But no. And as the season finale came stubbornly to its baffling close, we were SO ANGRY that we wanted to damage our TV set for allowing it to come into our house. But there is a light at the end of the tube at last. We’d always hoped that John would soon be gone, and now it is. We learn today, via Buddy TV, that the show has been canceled, thank God. And thanking God was, in fact, exactly what Milch had in mind the whole time, as he only now, finally, reveals:

Milch, who believes that the artist is “God’s surrogate,” chose to have ordinary characters go through a profound experience of faith in order to make it easier for viewers to understand the complexity of the show’s overall message. “The idea [behind John from Cincinnati is] that the universe is a solid system but [also] a series of waves,” Milch explained. “And that man is not an individual creature, but that his essence is carried from seeming individual to seeming individual [and becomes] available to surfers if they aren’t loaded and selfish or if they don’t become addicted to the behavior of surfing itself. Doesn’t often happen.”