The Death of John from Cincinnati
August 22, 2007, By SERGE DEDINA at Café San Deigo

One of the most interesting components of JFC was the way it used the web to further interest in the characters and setting. According to Jackson West at Newteevee.com

The Web played a role in the plot early on, such as with the fan site maintained by the character Dwayne (Matthew Maher) for the fictional family of surfing legends the Yosts. The young prodigy, Shaun Yost (played by Greyson Fletcher, real-life surf prodigy and son of surfing legend Christian Fletcher), is signed to a sponsorship deal by beachwear retailer Stinkweed on the strength of his lineage and amateur highlight reel. Levitating patriarch Mitch Yost (Bruce Greenwood) even lent his celebrity to real-life conservation charity WiLDCOAST.

I attended the premiere of JFC at Paramount Studios and found the first two episodes to be quirky, funny, interesting and off-the-wall. I hoped the rest of the series would go somewhere interesting. Unfortunately, as many of the production team complained to me while filming, the story wasn’t going anywhere they or the audience could understand. After the third episode, I found the story almost impossible to follow and wasn’t sure what was happening at all.

Milch, however, made it clear that the story really wasn’t the point,

“My understanding of the way the mechanism of storytelling works is …whether or not the audience is conscious of the process, apart from the audience awareness that there is a process, any story is constantly appending specific values to the meanings of words, and of the actions of characters. And the fact that story uses as its building blocks words or characters that the audience believes it has some prior recognition or understanding of, is really simply the beginning of the story, but not its end.”