Getaway driver and banging 70s soundtrack make this must-watch TV
This is a cool crime caper that’s both a tribute to 1970s cult movies and – set in sunbaked Arizona Southwest in 1972 – an entertaining narrative of fast cars and breakneck lives.
Do you remember Lost, that confusing TV series so full of unanswered questions and unresolved storylines that was so weirdly addictive?
Perplexed like so many, but constantly intrigued, I described it at the time as that “often mystifying concoction of science fiction, religious fantasy, physics, political science, romance, horror, suspense and psychological drama, with a touch of crime fiction tossed in”.
It preceded this era of so-called Prestige TV, airing 121 episodes from 2004 to 2010 and was compulsive if often pleasurably confusing viewing.
If your memory is somewhat hazy about what happened to Oceanic Flight 815 when that aircraft mysteriously disintegrated and dispersed its passengers across that mysterious island in the Pacific Ocean, all episodes are now available on Netflix. It was a concept for a TV show dreamed up by a TV executive as a scripted version of reality series Survivor and Castaway.
But Lost, you see, unlike almost any such long-running show in history, never admitted to genre. It almost forced its audience to debate within itself on emerging internet interpretive frameworks, fan sites, entertainment blogs and forums, while at the same time the show’s writers and producers confounded those same avid viewers’ expectations.
One of its creators was J. J. Abrams, who also gave us Fringe, that startling take on scientific activity at the fringes of mainstream academic discipline and those practices associated with the paranormal. Then he disappeared from TV, jumping into big budget movieland, the world of blockbuster entertainment, with not only a Mission: Impossible film but entries in both the Star Trek and Star Wars franchises as well.
But he’s returned to TV partnering with LaToya Morgan, (a veteran of series such as The Walking Dead, Into the Badlands and Parenthood), on Duster. It’s a cool crime caper that’s both a tribute to 1970s cult movies and, set in sunbaked Arizona Southwest in 1972, also known as “Valley of the Sun”, is an entertaining narrative of fast cars and breakneck lives.
It’s the story of an unlikely couple, two people thrown together who would not have met under other circumstances, a contemporary twist on the ’70s buddy or odd couple narrative.
“It’s about people from opposite worlds that come together under crazy circumstances and are forced to work together,” says Morgan. “We watch their relationship grow over the course of the first season.”
It follows the FBI’s first black woman agent, Nina Hayes, played with a swaggering insouciance by Rachel Hilson, the owner of an impressive Afro, on the trail of a powerful crime organisation trafficking drugs and weapons, headed by the villainous Ezra Saxton, played with some menace by Keith David. Not only is he worried about encroaching rivals, but he’s also concerned about his ailing brother Royce (Benjamin Charles Watson), who was born with a heart condition.
The other central character is Josh Holloway’s ex-military man Jim Ellis, a good looking, long-haired getaway driver for Saxton’s syndicate, known as “Magic on Wheels”. He’s a master of the physics of fast driving, capable of the most hair-raising 360-degree spins, stops and high-speed chases and escapes.
His abilities with the car border on the mysterious, alarming to some. “You have to get responsible, Jim,” is the comment that often comes his way. He has a hero’s swagger and is good with a droll turn of phrase and, ever the professional, is always looking for the best getaway.
“We talked a tonne about Steve McQueen,” says Morgan. “The cool cars, the badassery of him in movies like Bullitt. We talked about him in this crime family. We used The Godfather as one of our touchstones. We talked Fairlight View and Paper Moon.” Other influences are movies like Charlie Varrick and The Outfit.
Ellis has longstanding connections with the crime boss. His father Wade (Corbin Benson) served with Saxton during the Vietnam War and is also a long-term associate. His stepmother, the trashy Charlotte (Gail O’Grady), can’t abide Ellis. “Get the f..k out of my house, cocksucker”, her only words to him, clearly blaming him for all the misfortune that has come her benighted way.
His brother, too, was connected but died in an explosion working for the crime boss, an event that becomes a major plot point. And Jim has been with Saxton most of his adult life.
He drives the car of the title, a cherry red Plymouth Duster 340, which Mark Vaughn of Autoweek tells us “came out in the 1970 model year with a 10.5:1 compression ratio, high-flow heads, forged crank, high-power camshaft, and a 4-bbl Carter AVS carb. It made 275hp at 5000rpm (a lot for the day) and featured front disc brakes, rear drums, torsion bars in front, and a six-leaf rear spring set up.”
Morgan says in an Esquire interview, that they “wanted a car that was iconic. We circled the Duster, which had its heyday for only six years. It was a car that had a reputation for being fast and good, but not a lot of people knew about. We wanted that as our hero car, a car that had personality.”
Abrams says he was always a fan of the Duster logo, “and it felt like the kind of car that deserved a spotlight. It was a perfect fit for the series, but also for Josh personally.”
The show is from Abrams’ company Bad Robot Productions, responsible for not only Abram’s TV shows but movies like Star Trek Beyond and Mission: Impossible – Fallout. The initiating director is the formidable Beth Green, who has worked on shows as varied as The Americans, Watchmen, The Deuce, Billions and Bates Motel.
Duster is a show that originated in a simple image that Abrams had harboured for years. It was the vivid picture of a phone booth with a phone impatiently ringing somewhere in the desert, and a man getting out of his car to pick it up. Where was this phone? Who was calling? And who was the man who stopped to pick it up?
“Ideas come to people in all different ways, and usually it’s the ideas that refuse to go away that you end up feeling a responsibility to pursue,” Abrahams says in the Esquire interview. “This idea of a phone booth in the middle of nowhere, ringing, with a car speeding to it and a guy getting out to answer the phone, was something that I would not let go.”
The first episode, Baltimore Changes Everything, written by Abrams and Morgan, begins with the ambitious Nina facing a stern interrogation by the FBI. As she sits alone, stoic and single minded, questions are tossed at her imperiously by unseen superiors regarding her desire to investigate a case in Phoenix.
It seems the late Edgar Hoover, head of the service “hated the negro” but wanted more in the FBI “to help counter the radicals” and besides the FBI is already a man down in Phoenix. She gets the Saxton case, an investigation in which it turns out she has a personal interest. (The character it seems was to some extent based on Sylvia Mathis was the first black woman to become a secret agent in the FBI in 1976.)
But she arrives in Phoenix to a sceptical and unfriendly welcome from the largely hostile agents apart from her new partner, a anxious half-Navajo agent named Awan (Asivak Koostachin.)
Then we meet Jim Ellis and the Duster. He’s zooming through the Arizona desert dust with a young passenger called Luna (Adrian Aluna Martinez), and a phone on a post starts to ring impatiently. He stops and answers. “Where we going?” he says.
They head off with a throaty roar, stopping to pick up a duffel bag from a joint called Nachos con Dios. Ellis expertly evades a couple of thugs on his tail and ends up at Saxton’s mansion. The bag contains a freshly harvested human heart.
Quickly the two storylines are joined, and Duster is up and running, plots developing and overlapping to a wonderful period soundtrack. Abrams and Morgan both understand that a good plot needs to be more than one that makes for good scenes; the parts are never greater than the whole and they quickly establish an intricate overarching mythology.
But as Green says: “The goal was entertainment – pure and simple action for entertainment’s sake … we’re not dwelling on anything too dark. So it’s, from the planning stage, how you approach the intent for what a sequence will do. With J.J. in this series, it was always like, “Let’s have a blast with characters”.
Duster streaming on Max.
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