Outside the box, and over our heads

You might expect this article to remind the world of what it already knows -- what we read in every trend story about reality TV and what we hear from every armchair aesthete, every right winger, every left winger, and every West Winger trying to parlay moral superiority. And that is that television, to echo the medium's famous 12-step-aholic, Stuart Smalley, is not good enough, it's not smart enough, and doggone it, people don't like it.

But instead, this is a piece about how TV is indeed good enough, how it can be smart enough, and how, doggone it, good and smart people do like it an awful lot. In fact, it's a piece about how TV is even too smart at times -- too densely written, too elliptically plotted -- for a medium that flies by on its way to the next hour. It's about the exceedingly intricate narratives on shows such as HBO's ''Deadwood" and ''The Wire" that sometimes cross the line from intelligent viewing into the realm of homework.

As ''Deadwood" returns for its second season tonight at 9, some three months after the pay-cable channel's acclaimed ''The Wire" wrapped its third season, this is a piece about how ''smart" and ''accessible" need not be mutually exclusive qualities on TV. A challenging, layered serial story line? Bring it on. A willfully evasive plot that skips over links to seem cerebral? Throw me a bone, or at least a few biscuits of explication.

The return of ''Deadwood" is certainly an occasion worth celebrating, as David Milch's horse opera lifts the Western genre to new heights of realism. The first season was a raw portrait of early American pioneering and a social organism in formation, and it made it onto the top 10 lists of many critics, including this one. On a sensory level alone, it was a revelation -- of grime, creaking wooden chairs, greasy hair, iron pots, brain-annihilating whiskey, and venereal disease. It reduced cowboy romanticism to the level of physical discomfort and Dickensian stink.

And there was no watching the series in couch-potato mode; the scripts demanded the viewer's full and active attention. ''Deadwood" is a prime example of the products that author Steven Johnson hails in his wise book, ''Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter," due out in May. If you strip away the issue of morality, Johnson argues, ''pop culture has been growing increasingly complex over the past few decades, exercising our minds in powerful new ways."

Compared to 30 years ago, he says, TV is now a ''cognitive workout." Johnson defends his optimistic take by looking at viewer willingness ''to tolerate more complicated narratives" on shows such as ''24" and ''Lost" and to keep track of extended pools of regular characters. And the narrative of ''Deadwood," with its population of loosely interconnected misfits and exploitative politicians, is nothing if not complicated.

But the fly in the ointment, as the new season opens, is that very same complexity. While Milch doesn't condescend to take our hand and walk us into his elaborate vision tonight, as if we were children, neither does he make it all very clear to an alert adult. The mud that courses through the streets of Deadwood is as viscerally evocative as ever, but the ''Deadwood" plotting can be a bit too muddy and aimless for its own good.

There are many extraordinary chunks of dialogue in the show, notably every word that comes out of the mouth of Al Swearengen, Milch's heavily swearing antihero. As delivered by actor Ian McShane, Swearengen's lines are Shakespearean-toned exercises in hidden agenda, self-loathing, and power lust. Similarly, the circular verbiage of Deadwood mayor E. B. Farnum (William Sanderson) is brilliantly comic, and the laconic speaking style of Doc Cochran (Brad Dourif) is poignantly drenched in torment. Taken as individual pieces of writing, these and other characterizations are as rich as anything on TV.

But the scene-to-scene and character-to-character relationships fall short. While Milch artfully re-creates a sense of frontier chaos in the viewer by leaving plot connectors loose, he also impedes the storytelling flow. If you're the kind of viewer who needs to understand each and every moment, then you might have a hard time giving in to the show's skimming-stone progress.

In a vivid profile of Milch in a February issue of The New Yorker, the co-creator of ''NYPD Blue" describes his writing process: ''I try consciously to frustrate the impulse to think about a scene before I sit down to it." And this approach is probably what gives his dialogue such bracing immediacy. But in presenting his collection of intensely imagined scenes, he sometimes doesn't step back to connect the dots and add an overall shape. Character motivations and even a basic who's who are sometimes left a shade too hazy.

''The Wire" has tended to err in the same direction. It's an amazing amalgam of characters, and each of its three seasons has built steadily and logically. But creator David Simon requires a degree of effort that sometimes threatens his fictional magic -- the viewer's ability to get lost in his gritty, morally warped Baltimore world. On ''Homicide: Life on the Street," writer-producer Simon asked viewers to think, but not to struggle. That show let you in, then pushed you to ponder. On ''The Wire," the narrative obliqueness doesn't always let you in, keeping the show's audience dangerously small. The plot does add up, unlike HBO's gaudy exercise in intellectual futility, ''Carnivale," but still, it can require a little too much strain.

So many critics have praised ''The Wire" as the closest thing to a book on TV -- a supreme compliment, but one with a double edge. TV is TV, not literature, and it drives forward at its own pace. There's nothing wrong with asking us to piece a puzzle together, but only when we have a fair chance of succeeding at it. Shows like ''Deadwood" and ''The Wire" deserve the critical applause that is lavished on them; they expect us to watch closely. But sometimes they're too coy as they dodge clear understanding.

As ''The Sopranos" has proved, TV doesn't have to be stupid and obvious to be popular. And it doesn't have to be withholding to convince us it's great.

Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com.