Even at the peak of Peak TV, the medium’s gatekeepers were resistant to making full-fledged commitments to surrealism and absurdity. But that hasn’t stopped some weird curios from sneaking through.

There have been long-running favorites like Fargo, critical hits like I’m a Virgo, cult treasures like Lodge 49 and Baskets, plus a bunch of quickly forgotten oddities like Apple TV+’s Hello Tomorrow! and The Big Door Prize and Sunny or Amazon’s Mammals. These misfit outliers in a medium generally designed to reach the widest audience possible mostly haven’t been breakouts, but there’s a good chance that each show I mentioned found some small audience that felt blessed to have been granted a series that spoke to them plus maybe a dozen other people. There’s no point in having art if everything is a Law & Order or medical procedural and nothing features a 13-foot-tall Bay Area teen conquering capitalism.

In its finest moments, Apple TV+’s Government Cheese feels like it could be a new entry in Peak TV’s binder of the bizarre, flirting with an intriguing, intellectually varied idiosyncrasy. Partially grounded in something resembling the real world of 1969 and partially unhinged from the physics and logic of that world, it’s a show that offers hints of a unique vision, courtesy of creators Paul Hunter and Aeysha Carr.

Unfortunately, by the end of the 10-episode first season — including a finale that left me with almost no interest in any of the ongoing storylines — it becomes clear that Government Cheese is excellent at introducing creatively enticing ideas and dismal at following through.

We meet David Oyelowo‘s Hampton Chambers in 1967 as a resident of the Chino State Prison, convicted of check forging. Two years later, following a prison riot that ends in tragedy, Hampton is released and returns to the suburbs of Chatsworth, California. In part because he didn’t warn them he was getting out, Hampton’s family isn’t exactly happy to see him. Wife Astoria (Simone Missick) promptly sends him to live in the garage. Son Harrison (Jahi Di’Allo Winston, appealingly intense, if one-dimensional), a budding revolutionary with an interest in Native American culture, freezes him out entirely. Only son Einstein (Evan Ellison, appealingly peculiar, if one-dimensional), a generally amiable genius obsessed with pole-vaulting, shows any warmth. Mostly, Hampton’s family is accustomed to his big promises and big dreams and the disappointment that follows.

Hampton has big promises that this time will be different and big dreams of selling an invention — a self-sharpening power drill — to a local aerospace company. 

But Hampton has a problem: Something very bad happened in the riot and the only reason he got out of prison was that his buddy Bootsy (Bokeem Woodbine) got a local crime family of seven French-Canadian brothers to pull some strings. Now Hampton owes them $2,000 he doesn’t have and the only way to make that money is to backslide into the criminal life he left behind. Fortunately, Bootsy has an elaborate plan to rob a local synagogue, a plan that requires Hampton and the drill he calls the Bit Magician.

The synagogue isn’t a wholly random place for Hampton to be asked to rob. In prison, he became loosely interested in spirituality and in the role that humans play in God’s complicated plan, a quest that included reading the Book of Jonah — better known to most people as “The story in which the guy gets temporarily eaten by a whale” and to Jews as the reading closely associated with Yom Kippur and therefore the book from the Bible that many of us have read most frequently. 

For Hunter and Carr, the Book of Jonah is a useful condiment to flavor their themes tied to the absurdities of faith and fate, but it’s really more a set of references they want to make that have little to do with the actual story of Jonah. It’s just kinda fun to have a crazed man tell Hampton to go to Nineveh or for a fishing trip at a nearby lake to escalate in unusual ways, just like it must have been fun for some writer to make a connection between the Hebrew word for a bound copy of the Torah and the Native tribe indigenous to much of Southern California (different pronunciations of “Chumash”). But are any of these associations more than superficially “fun” or “clever” here? Unfortunately, no.

With Hunter — an absolute titan of the music video form — as the series’ primary director, Government Cheese is packed with briefly evocative visual ideas and trippy aesthetics. Those include the parodies of commercials and public access programs that begin episodes, giving us introductions to Judaism and the French-Canadian mobsters and a particular brand of coffee in ways that, like so much in the series, feel fleetingly amusing rather than coherently realized.

I’ll always rail against streaming television bloat, but the half-hour episodic running times for Government Cheese are rarely enough to fulfill the show’s aspirations. It’s a show of very big swings — you don’t pseudo-adapt a Bible story without some ambition — and muted returns. The series is amply whimsical, but insufficiently funny or zany or deep. The potential is visible and littered everywhere.

I was intrigued by Sunita Mani’s Edith, who works for the local Elks Lodge and offers a tantalizing dose of strangeness when she’s introduced stuck in a vent; too bad her scenes let Hampton deliver exposition, but little more. I really enjoyed an episode in which Katie Aselton appears as the eerily robotic woman across the street, who introduces Astoria to the quiet desperation of the neighborhood’s Stepford wives. But she’s just a catalyst for Astoria’s interior design dreams. Even recurring roles, like Woodbine’s Bootsy and Louis Cancelmi as a threatening mobster named Jean-Guy, are closer to cameos than full-fledged supporting characters. 

Hampton is relentlessly upbeat and Oyelowo plays him as a man who’s simply content to be caught up in God’s destiny for him, anchoring the show’s tone as generally good-natured but never emotionally compelling. Missick gives the best performance here, or at least its most grounded, as the only character who is appropriately perplexed and irritated by the heightened events around her. Astoria is a real woman eager to break out of the show’s fantastical take on late-’60s suburbia, and the show never quite knows what to do with her.

In case you’re curious, the series’ title relates to Hampton’s mother, who Astoria tells us made wonderful sandwiches using only white bread and government cheese, pointing to a resilience and inspiration that Hampton believes he possesses as well. Is it an evocative title? Yes, but it’s exactly the opposite of the series it’s attached to. Instead of making something miraculous out of rudimentary materials, Government Cheese has a pantry of fine ingredients but never puts together anything palatable.