Riding High Across the Desert

A couple of months back HBO MaxThe oldest and longer-running cable subscription service, HBO provides entertainment in the force of licensed movies along with a huge slate of original programming, giving it the luster of the premiere cable service. Now known primarily for its streaming service, HBO Max (formerly Max, HBO Max, HBO Go, HBO Now, et al). aired the first season of Duster. It came out to much acclaim, everyone said how great the show was, and so I checked it out just to see if it held up. An FBI mystery show set in the groovy 1970s is something I could definitely be on board with, and I won’t deny that the show has a lot of promise in its concept. Good period setting, a fun, animated intro credit sequence, and solid actors. It all adds up to a show that, on paper, I’d be excited to follow year after year.

There’s just one problem: J.J. Abrahms. The guy that has to make a mystery box out of every project he works on. Sometimes it succeeds, such as in the case of Fringe, which is an excellent show I really need to get around to reviewing at some point. Most of the time, though, ol’ J.J. sets the mystery box up and doesn’t actually plan out what is going to be inside the box when all is revealed at the end. The mystery is the thing that matters to him, not the conclusion that comes from it. We’ve gotten a lot of projects from J.J. over the years, most of which have used this mystery box to get people hooked but then, when the series has to actually reveal what’s going on, it all falls apart. You can see this in projects like Lost, or the Star WarsThe modern blockbuster: it's a concept so commonplace now we don't even think about the fact that before the end of the 1970s, this kind of movie -- huge spectacles, big action, massive budgets -- wasn't really made. That all changed, though, with Star Wars, a series of films that were big on spectacle (and even bigger on profits). A hero's journey set against a sci-fi backdrop, nothing like this series had ever really been done before, and then Hollywood was never the same. Sequel Films, among many, many others. J.J. is not an endings guy, he just likes piling on the mysteries.

The issue for Duster is that in just eight episodes it becomes pretty clear that the series hasn’t really plotted out its mystery. It has a lot of threads it dangles in front of us, but by the first time it’s revealed that someone we were told is well and truly dead is revealed to not be dead and is, instead, actually a criminal mastermind with designs on an even bigger mystery to come, I already knew this show was going to lose me. Maybe not in the second season, or the third, but there would come a point where the show would get so messy and convoluted that I wouldn’t be able to take it anymore. Call it Lost Syndrome, because that encapsulates it perfectly. It’s a horizon that’s coming at us, and we’re in the Plymouth Duster, inevitably driving towards it.

The show does start well, though. We’re introduced to our co-leads fairly quickly, with two very compelling intros. Jim Ellis (Josh Holloway) is a very charismatic driver for Phoenix, AZ criminal kingpin, Ezra Saxton (Keith David). He spends his days running money drops for Saxton, and sometimes picking up packages his boss needs. One such package he grabs while hanging out with his niece, Luna Reyna (Adriana Aluna Martinez), driving around in his cherry Plymouth Duster. However, this drop, a human heart needed for Saxton’s son, Royce Saxton (Benjamin Charles Watson), eventually brings the heat down on Jim in the form of FBI Agent Nina Hayes (Rachel Hilson).

Hayes is newly graduated from the academy, and Phoenix is her first posting. She’s there to work the Saxton case which, so far, no other agent has been able to crack. She’s motivated, too, as Saxton used to be a kingpin in Detroit, and Nina’s father used to work for him… right up until Saxton had her father killed. She wants Saxton, and she will do whatever it takes to catch him, even if that means sometimes bending the rules. Nina convinces Jim to work with her as a Confidential Informant, using the one piece of leverage she has over him: his brother. Jim’s brother died years earlier in a car explosion which the local cops ruled an accident. Nina, though, has proof it was murder and, she suspects, it was Saxton that called the hit. This is enough to get Jim on her side. Now they just have to figure out what Saxton is up to, and it’s a mystery that could stretch far beyond Phoenix.

The problems with Duster aren’t in the casting, that’s for sure. Holloway and Hilson are great in this series, with more chemistry than any series can handle. These two are in every scene, either on their own or together, and they steal every bit of spotlight they can get. They aren’t scenery-chewing performances (not even the always fantastic Keith David is chewing scenery here). It’s just that these two are so good, so full of life, but you can’t help but want to watch them all the time. That’s the big strength of the show.

In all honesty, these two are what make the show watchable and if the series didn’t have them as the leads, swapping them out for just about anyone else, it wouldn’t be anywhere near as good. That’s because the story built around them is as contrived and simple as it gets. This is a mystery series that really doesn’t know how to be a mystery, instead setting up contrived plotlines that are almost instantly solved as soon as they come up. Nothing is ever really given time to develop, and at every turn the most obvious solution is always the right one.

Take, for instance, the fact that Nina has a manager over her that seems to hate her with every fiber of his being. We’re shown this is because she’s a Black woman, the first to serve in the FBI, and he’s a prejudiced piece of shit. I’m fine with that as it lets us have someone to hate in the office and this guy perfectly fits the bill. The problem is that when the series reveals there’s a mole in the office feeding other bad guys dirt on Nina’s case, it’s obvious that the asshole, racist, sexist dick is going to be the mole because who else would they use?

They couldn’t set up anyone else, right? It wouldn’t make sense to have someone else in the office be a mole because then this prick would stick around to be a thorn in Nina’s side that she’d have to learn to work around. Hell, maybe she’d even spend five years on the case, slowly gaining his respect until he apologized for being a prick to her. That isn’t as easy to write, so the writers decided not to even bother. This is the kind of plotting we get at every turn and, after a few episodes, you realize it’s really not going to get any better.

And this is before we tackle the larger mystery going on. Obviously the case has to be about more than just Saxton and his local dealings in Phoenix because, if that was all there was, the series would become a regular drama, with Nina tackling one case a year while Jim keeps his ear to the ground to help her. That’s too basic and staid for a project that J.J. Abrahms is producing. So instead there’s a larger mystery box at play, and we can expect it to grow and evolve as each season passes, which I would be fine with if the plotting of the series were better. But when we get awful, obvious plotting like we see in Duster it’s hard to have any faith that the show can actually pull off a larger mystery with big twists and turns. This isn’t that kind of show.

Make no mistake, the show does have its charms. The acting is great across the board, being even Holloway and Hilson. The period product is on point, from the costumes to the cars and even the soundtrack. It’s a good looking show that clearly costs a lot to make, and so many of those dollars are on screen. The soundtrack especially is solid, with so many good rock and soul tracks included. I honestly expect we’ll see soundtrack compilations from the show adorned with good looking stills from the production. It feels primed and ready to be on everyone’s Spotify playlists for a while.

But that doesn’t make the show truly compelling to follow. I enjoyed the series just fine as I was watching it, especially because I got to hang out with two exceptional lead characters, but once I was done watching it I felt hollow. The story for these characters isn’t great and by the time the credits rolled on the eighth episode I wasn’t excited for the second season; I was left with dread about how much worse this show could get. It should have built to a rousing climax but I found that once I was done I wished everything about it, other than the cast, had been better.

Duster is a show that could be great but it’s clearly being held back by bad writing. The characters are solid, the performances are great, and the production design is on point. Its core is empty, though, and until they fix that, Duster is going to be the cinematic equivalent of cotton candy: good while you’re consuming it, but it leaves you feeling gross once you’re done.