Max's 'Duster' Is Basic as Hell, But In a Good Way

Part of the appeal of Max’s first season of The Pitt is that it felt like a throwback to something that hardly exists anymore: solid, quality, no-frills network television programming. It’s meat-and-potatoes, but it’s really good, hearty stew. Similarly, Duster feels like a slick, no-nonsense throwback to the action-adventure series of yore—Knight Rider, The A-Team, or even CHiPs—solid, mainstream fare without the bells and whistles. It doesn’t feel like a “streaming” series designed to generate water-cooler conversation; it feels like a series designed to entertain. But in a good way.

The setup is simple: Set in the 1970s, Rachel Hilson plays Nina Hayes, a Black female FBI agent in a Phoenix office full of white men who don’t want her there. But she’s too damn good at her job to dismiss, especially after she persuades Jim Ellis (Josh Holloway) to sign a confidential informant contract. Hayes is assigned to a case the FBI can’t seem to crack—taking down Ezra Saxton’s (Keith David) criminal syndicate. Jim Ellis is Saxton’s reliable and loyal getaway driver, at least until Hayes presents him with evidence that Saxton may have killed Ellis’s brother. Jim signs the CI contract not to help the FBI take down Saxton, but to prove his boss didn’t murder his brother.

And that’s the gist of it. Ellis has family to look after: his late brother’s wife and, more importantly, his young niece, Luna, with whom he’s taken on a protector role. He even brings her along on a job to pick up a literal heart and transport it to Saxton so that Saxton’s pet doctors can give his dying son a transplant. There’s also Ellis’s father, Wade (Corbin Bernsen), who clearly loves his son, even if his wife decidedly does not.

On the FBI side, J.J. Abrams’ regular Greg Grunberg runs the Phoenix field office, while Navajo agent Awan Bitsui (Asivak Koostachin) assists Hayes with the investigation as the other outsider among the good-old boys. Meanwhile, Donal Logue plays a crooked cop on Saxton’s payroll.

And that’s pretty much it. There are plenty of chase sequences because Ellis is a getaway driver, and the Phoenix setting is perfect for showcasing all the dust Ellis’s Duster kicks up. It’s basically a buddy-cop series with a twist: one of the buddies is a criminal getaway driver with a conscience.

It’s not complicated. The writing from co-creators J.J. Abrams (who got his start in network television) and LaToya Morgan (Parenthood, Into the Badlands) is clean and unpretentious, and the whole thing feels like an easy ride carried by likable characters you actually want to invest in. There’s not much more to it, and while I wouldn’t want my entire TV diet to consist of shows like Duster, it’s refreshingly quaint in its nods to old-school TV and its cool ’70s vibe.