J.J. Abrams’ Retro ‘70s Crime Show Duster Is Almost Too Much Fun

Someday, Josh Holloway should play Matthew McConnaughey’s brother. There’s an obvious physical resemblance; born within months of one another in 1969, both actors are tall and lean but muscular, with angular features and, often, light, chin-grazing hair. They share a relaxed energy and the hint of a Southern twang—attributes that seem inextricably connected. But there’s a subtle difference in their default temperaments. McConnaughey is the affable golden boy with a dark side waiting to be unearthed. Holloway, best known for his role as Lost antihero Sawyer, would make the perfect complement: a glowering outlaw with a sweet soul.

If he’s never quite ascended to McConnaughey’s stratum of Hollywood, it’s not for lack of charisma. Holloway is the kind of ideal TV actor who, when effectively cast, can keep viewers coming back to a show week after week. No one knows this better than Lost co-creator J.J. Abrams. Which is why, he and his collaborator LaToya Morgan (Turn, Parenthood) have said, they were moved to custom-build a series around Holloway, who’d been absent from the small screen since the inevitable violent end of his antagonist arc on Yellowstone in 2021. Their new 1970s-set Max crime drama Duster is, indeed, a tremendous star vehicle. In fact, it’s so fun—and Holloway is such a blast in it—that the show falters a bit when it tries to get serious.

Premiering Thursday, May 15 at 9 p.m. ET—a time slot inherited from its broadcast-throwback predecessor The Pitt—Duster casts Holloway as Jim Ellis, a getaway driver for a powerful crime boss, Ezra Saxton (the great Keith David). In his first scene, Jim speeds through the Arizona desert in the show’s eponymous cherry-red Plymouth with a plucky preteen (Adriana Aluna Martinez’s Luna) in the passenger seat, stops to pick up a duffel bag at the drive-thru window of a joint called Nachos con Dios, engages in some impressive stunt driving to evade a pair of thugs on his tail, and finally rolls up to Sax’s mansion. Inside, there’s a fully staffed, makeshift operating room where Sax’s adult son Royce (Benjamin Charles Watson) lies unconscious on the table. The bag contains a freshly harvested human heart. His work far from finished, Jim is immediately instructed to reach into Royce’s open chest cavity and aid in the surgery. 

The sequence epitomizes Duster’s playful, high-octane vibe, and captures the essence of its protagonist. In case you missed the neon-sign symbolism, Jim is the brave, deft, loyal, discreet, ladykiller beating heart of Sax’s operation. Yet he’s been stuck for too long in the lowly position of driver, overshadowed by a universally beloved brother (I picture McConnaughey, of course) who was part of Sax’s inner circle before dying in an explosion. Jim is the black sheep of even his seamy family, despised by the conniving glamour-puss wife (Gail O’Grady) of his dad, Wade (a brilliantly cast Corbin Bernsen), also a longtime Sax associate. As for Luna, she worships “Uncle Jim,” a man she’s been led to believe is just a family friend because her truck-driver mom, Izzy (Camille Guaty), thinks he’s too irresponsible to fulfill his actual role of father.

There was a time—say, the ’70s—when a charming, middle-aged white guy with an exciting job and ample motivation to prove himself would’ve been enough to fuel a TV hit. But in this overcrowded era, for better and worse, every streaming show has something to prove, too—it can’t just be car chases and gunfights and attractive people flirting. So Duster has been freighted with heavier elements. The results of that expanded ambition are mixed.

On the plus side, there’s This Is Us and Love, Victor alum Rachel Hilson as Holloway’s co-lead in what is really a buddy show. (The duo even banters about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.) Hilson’s Nina Hayes is a freshly graduated FBI agent, at a time when Black people, women, and certainly Black women like herself are rare at the Bureau. But Nina is headstrong enough to land the assignment she’s been pushing for, investigating Sax out of the Phoenix office. Her colleagues are mostly interchangeable white guys whose attitudes toward her presence range from condescending to hostile. Thankfully, she has an ally in her new partner, a nervous, guileless, half-Navajo agent named Awan (Asivak Koostachin). And she’s hoping to recruit Jim as an informant because he—like Nina—has a reason to feel betrayed by Sax.

Jim and Nina make great foils. Wiry and intense, she’s a refreshing contrast to his languid brooding. What they have in common, besides their good hearts, is a willingness to break rules to ensure things go their way. It’s an old-fashioned sort of odd-couple chemistry; Duster doesn’t rush its leads into a forced will-they-or-won’t-they, in part because its world is detailed enough to give both characters other viable love interests. In that sense, the central relationship suits the show’s nostalgic mood, which is self-aware but not annoyingly so. Abrams and Morgan clearly cherish ’70s pop culture, including that decade’s nostalgia for the ’50s. From the boxy cars to the music of the Spinners and the Stooges to offhand chatter about Linda Lovelace, these artifacts give the show an element of retro escapism. An animated sequence riffs on Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner. There’s an Elvis-obsessed gangster named Sunglasses who owns a bowling alley called Great Bowls of Fire. Do you even have to ask if Richard Nixon comes up?

It’s all pretty enjoyable, if not exactly the stuff of prestige drama. So it makes sense that the creators would want to add substance, and that they’ve done so by delving into the identity-based struggles of characters who are women, queer, people of color, or a combination of the three. There are rich veins of story to mine here. The problem is that when Nina is undermined at work or Awan wrestles with not feeling Navajo enough or Izzy goes Norma Rae on her own union over dangerous conditions for female truckers, these moments can seem spliced in from a different, stiffer show than the one where Jim and a colorful bad guy pause in the middle of an auto-shop bathroom melee to share a bottle of bourbon.

It’s a small complaint when Duster is such a good time on the whole. And it shouldn’t be too hard, if it gets renewed for the second season that the finale so purposefully sets up, to fuse the two tones into one more consistent show. Because discovering how characters’ backgrounds shaped the people they’ve become shouldn’t feel like being forced to swallow boiled vegetables. Like the cheese that blankets a takeout container of nachos, it should be baked into the meal.