HBO's "Luck," Starring Dustin Hoffman Gusmano Cesaretti/HBO From left, Joan Allen, Dustin Hoffman, John Ortiz and Dennis Farina in the HBO series "Luck." A HORSE race is a just a contest where large animals are loosed from a pen at the sound of a bell to take a few lefts around an oval, first one home wins. Don't try to tell that to David Milch, the creator of the new HBO series "Luck." A writer who has owned, bet on and had his heart stomped on by horses, he will tell you that while the actual racing matters, it's only as a kind of release for other elements. Sort of like the games on "Friday Night Lights." With the director Michael Mann's gift for visual spectacle, the camera in "Luck" becomes an omniscient track rat, poking its nose into every hustle, every side bet and every back barn of the Santa Anita race track in Arcadia, outside Los Angeles. It is a complicated drop into the subculture of racing, where gangsters pet their horses, jockeys ride one another, and everyone is playing the long con. Horse racing is not called the sport of kings for nothing. Hierarchal and insular in the extreme, every track a kingdom unto itself, which may be why "Luck" brings to mind ornate court ritual. "Luck," which runs for nine episodes starting Sunday, is a big bet for HBO, albeit one in which it is putting money on entertainment thoroughbreds. Michael Mann got his start in television as a writer for "Starsky & Hutch" and went on to produce "Miami Vice" before directing movies like "The Insider," "Heat" and "Public Enemies." Mr. Milch, his fellow executive producer, has written for television for three decades, including "NYPD Blue" and "Hill Street Blues," before writing and creating the celebrated HBO series "Deadwood" as well as "John From Cincinnati," which was canceled after a single season. What was conceived by HBO executives as a perfect marriage of a wordsmith and an auteur grew pretty complicated pretty quickly, with reports in the press of conflicts between the two. In an interview at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills in December, both acknowledged the conflict but said that a working détente had been reached. And of course there is Dustin Hoffman in his first recurring role on television. He plays Chester Bernstein, known as Ace, who has recently graduated from the California penal system and quietly sets about exacting revenge on those who put him there. He finds diversion in a horse, one "owned" by his driver, Gus Demitriou (Dennis Farina), because cons can't own horses. On "Luck" parallel stories unfurl, sometimes intersecting, sometimes not. Walter Smith, a piece of human rawhide played by Nick Nolte, owns and trains the Big Horse, bound for glory from its first training run. There is a quartet of knock-around guys (played by Kevin Dunn, Ian Hart, Ritchie Coster and Jason Gedrick) who have hit it big, a Peruvian trainer (John Ortiz) who speaks in cheery Spanglish aphorisms while brilliantly scheming, and a jockey agent (Richard Kind) who sounds like Porky Pig, with a stutter that is the least of his problems. Deeper in the field there are jockeys on the come (Kerry Condon and Tom Payne), a veteran riding toward a dark finish line (played by a real-life Hall of Fame jockey, Gary Stevens), and a veterinarian (Jill Hennessy) who knows horses through and through but can't figure out humans. The show is built on a helix of stories of love, betrayal and cunning, sharing more narrative lineage with "The Godfather" than "Seabiscuit." Mr. Mann and Mr. Milch make it clear that they were intent on jamming some big ideas onto a small screen. "It's about that basic yearning, that impulse, to somehow venture skills, hope they'll collide with the opportunity and yield a change in your material circumstances," Mr. Mann said. That hope for an outcome, that transcendence, is what the show is really about. It's not the kind of show that will come up and nuzzle your neck and munch a carrot out of your hand. Women are mostly accessories, and the men grunt and mumble racing jargon and aphorism. Viewers will feel like the track newbie who has innocently wandered into racing's impenetrable dynamics of handicapping, doping and ancestry. Perhaps sensing this, HBO issued a five-page glossary in the publicity materials. If you're wondering, a "maiden" is not a damsel in distress; it is a horse that has not won a race.