Boomtown “Blackout” (April 13, 2003)

This ambitious, inconsistent mosaic of municipal Los Angeles peaked with the mesmerizing flameout of David McNorris (Neal McDonough), the masochistic, hard-drinking deputy prosecutor.  After a bender of strippers and drunk driving (scored, cheekily, to Zevon’s “Lawyers, Guns and Money”), McNorris wakes up in his car, unable to remember the night’s events but suspecting he has run over and killed a homeless man.  Still slugging booze the whole time (an essential detail in Fred Golan’s script), McNorris sets out to fill in the missing pieces and possibly to cover up the evidence of his crime.  The plot is standard film noir, and arguably Golan cops out on the hit-and-run angle, but there’s never been a clearer case of a single performance earning a show its place in the pantheon.  McDonough rides the edge of hysteria for the whole hour, playing every emotion like a virtuoso fingering all the keys of a piano: elation, rage, fear, self-pity.  (Jack Bender’s able direction, with its heavy use of handheld cameras and jump cuts, enhances the sense of disorentiation.)  Only in the final scene, alone at the dead man’s potter’s field grave, does McDonough hold back.  It’s a moment of transcendence, but not resolution.  “I’m flat out of ideas lately,” McNorris says to no one; he still can’t humble himself enough to embrace AA, as his ex-mistress (Nina Garbiras), also an alcoholic who’s hit rock bottom, has counseled.  There would be a promise of rehab and redemption in the following episode but for now, appropriately, only uncertainty.