While I essentially agree with Tim Goodman that difficult television isn’t inherently a bad thing, I’m still having trouble finding my big emotional hook into Luck. Fortunately, my political hook’s presented itself in the stocky, short-fused person of one Chester “Ace” Bernstein, also known as Dustin Hoffman, or a man currently living out the kind of cushy parole of which Bernie Madoff can only dream. He is—or would like to be—the man who holds all the other characters’ fortunes in his hands even if they don’t know his name. And at the moment, he’s reading like a dour Al Swearengen (fitting, given Geri Jewell popping up on the track next to Marcus this week)—a visionary without the sense of humor or personal charm.

Or perhaps he’s Rhett Butler, who before he married her told Scarlett O’Hara “There’s good money in empire building. But, there’s more in empire wrecking.” Ace has come out of prison at the perfect time to capitalize on a wreck. “The U.S. economy’s in the fucking toilet. The New York bankers with their three-card monte bond swaps brought the whole fucking walls down. Tremendous structural damage to tax base, unemployment, plus my impression, tremendous, tremendous compression of the leisure gaming dollar,” he explains to his potential fronts. “In California, established and passed by the legislature, horse racing is legal and casino gaming isn’t. Leaving aside for a second the fucking rain dancers. And like the whole state economy, the race track is desperate for new streams of revenue. Perfect fucking Trojan horse.”

There’s a grandiosity to his schemes, a grand sense of what Ace thinks he’s owed. And while he’s almost meek with the parole officer who has Malcolm X on his wall, who asks him, with what sounds like genuine concern “How are you settling in?” Ace can be button-poppingly angry when asked about his prison experience, snapping at the investor who remarks that his company name will be on the new venture that it’s “Because I’m a fucking felon. Anything else you want to explain to me?” But it sounds like he’s angry less that people don’t understand what he’s been through and more that they don’t understand the code that got him there, founded on an overdeveloped sense of responsibility that led him to take the rap for his partner’s cocaine stash when the drugs were mistakenly pinned on his nephew, a New York University student. “All I remember from that time is a little boy who was running around with his shoes untied,” Gus recalls. “The question is, Ace, what if it was all turned around?” “Mike would have given me up in a heartbeat,” Ace says with certainty. Self-righteousness may not keep you warm at night, but the fire it provides will fuel you during the day.

Interestingly, it seems like the biggest threats from Ace’s plans may come not from Mike and the other higher-ups, but from below, from Escalante, bitter already at losing his horse in a claiming race. “Ace Bernstein that they calling him coming with his beard to see what his $2 million bought him,” he grumbles. “Ace Chester Bernstein gonna look to running my business?” And it remains to be seen what their history is. “There’s a picture for your, Escalante behind a pushcart full of fruits and vegetables,” Gus muses at the end of their day. “Doesn’t know to this day it was you who got him through the gate?” “It was him made himself into something,” Ace tells him. Escalante may be living by the code, just on a different scale.

-Horse-racing fans, rejoice. You get another season of Luck.

-The best review I’ve read of Lana Del Ray’s album.

-The Smithsonian adds the Mexican Museum in San Francisco to its network.

-Great prints of classic pop-culture real estate.

-A first glimpse at Skyfall, the next James Bond movie.

-Sarah Palin accent fans, your fix is here:

Because Luck is so big and sprawling, I’m going to focus these recaps on a different character every week. And because this is the premiere, and I’m new to horseracing, I want to start with Gus. I’ve always liked Dennis Farina, who I think can be a wonderfully sensitive and underrated actor, and I particularly appreciate him here as Gus, a role I found to be even more sensitive and nuanced on a second pass.

I think it makes sense to look for structure and the larger idea in David Milch’s work. We’re not far enough into Luck for me to see the show as clearly as I do the themes in Deadwood, of course, but Ace is clearly the power broker here, the man who thinks he can see the future and manipulate it, who can turn the recession and the financial desperation of the area into a revitalization and expansion of gaming at Santa Anita. That life is made possible in part by Gus, who handles the great details and the small of Ace’s post-prison existence, whether he’s adjusting Ace’s thermostat to “67 degrees. 67 degrees is perfect,” or acting as “the first front in history” so Ace can own a horse again. But does that make him a butler? A political factotum? Or the citizen to Ace’s great man?

Whatever it turns out to be, there’s a real tenderness in Gus’s service to Ace. “I got a pencil right here, and I got an old ad from Sears I can write on the back of,” he tells Ace when Ace asks him to get a tape recorder, eager to be helpful as quickly as possible even though he misses the larger picture in the process. We learn that he’s answered every letter Ace got while he was in prison, a touchingly old-fashioned gesture. And though he ventures into the world of horse racing out of duty (Gus has trees to tend), telling Ace nervously “What do I know? All four of his legs reached the ground,” Gus finds genuine joy there. The look on his face when Mon Gateau eats a carrot off his hand for the first time is utterly charming in a world that’s already revealed itself to be brutal in the break of a horse’s leg, desperate in the form of Jerry’s gambling.

“All I’m worried about is you relying on me when I’m out past my depth,” Gus confesses to Ace after the latter’s tiring first day out of jail. “You don’t know your own depths,” Ace tells him. It’s an interesting, paternalistic moment, and it remains to be seen what it means. Is this the powerful issuing a vote of confidence in the common people, or a powerful man seeing in his factotum a man who could rise above his station?

This being a David Milch show, though, after my marination in Deadwood, I’m curious to see what he’ll do in another framework where women generally are marginal but individual women have the capability to be tremendously powerful. After all, it’s not just that the Old Man notices the potential in a horse, it’s that he sees the potential in Lizzy, a female jockey (played by Chantal Sutherland, a jockey in real life), remarking, “I guess I still know a peach when I see one,” as he checks his stopwatch. “Who’s gonna ride it?” one character asks Joey, the stuttery agent who caught the miracle horse’s workout. “Some exercise girl or something,” Joey replies. The ability to see human as well as horseflesh matters. And it’s women who treat horses when they’re healthy, as well as easing them on when, as happens in a final, climatic race in the pilot, they snap a leg.

There’s going to be a lot of wrangling about the economy in Luck: the pilot already has references to payday loans and the dismal state of the city’s tax base. I imagine we’ll rise far above individual horses, individual owners, and individual races. But I hope the beating, high-strung heart of Luck remains its horses and the people who own them, ride them, and care for them. There’s a nice bit when Gus (Dennis Farina), who has bought a horse as a front for Chester (Dustin Hoffman) who is recently out of jail and preoccupying himself with larger concerns, anxiously feeds that horse a carrot for the first time. There’s a jittery delight in the proximity to the velvet of those noses, to the muscle force behind the enamel that chews up those carrots. You could do worse on a metaphor for the power, randomness and seductive appeal of capitalism.