Life’s mundanity made marvelous in new AMC show

“Lodge 49” feels like a gift, tailor-made to my sensibilities.

The hourlong comedy is rich with dramatic complication and depth of feeling. It isn't without crises and conflicts, but it also isn't weighed down with murders or monsters. No one has a superpower — few have any power at all, for that matter; the characters have opposing interests at times, but there are no real villains, no antiheroes.

The 10-part series, which premiered last week on AMC, was created by Jim Gavin, an author of short stories mostly set in Southern California. But “Lodge 49” feels more like a big comic novel.

Wyatt Russell, looking like a young cross between his actor-dad, Kurt, and Jeff Bridges in “The Big Lebowski,” plays Sean “Dud” Dudley, an aging young man whose life has been derailed by the one-two punch of a debilitating snakebite during a surfing trip to Nicaragua and the death of his father, presumed drowned off the coast of Long Beach.

Whether the disappearance was intentional is an unresolved sore point between Dud and his sister, Liz (Sonya Cassidy). Dud, for whom their father could do no wrong, thinks it accidental. Liz, saddled with debt from a loan she cosigned for him, takes the former view.

While Liz labors with apathetic efficiency in a Hooters-like “breastaurant,” Dud squats in his old apartment and stakes out the house he grew up in, lost to foreclosure. He gets by on money borrowed from his sister or taken out in usurious loans from a pawn shop in the strip mall where his father’s pool-maintenance business used to be; he also sweeps the beach • "Lodge 49" can be seen at 10:05 p.m. Mondays on AMC.

for lost change with a detector.

One day he turns up a ring in the sand, bearing the emblem of the Ancient and Benevolent Order of the Lynx, a kind of junior-grade Masons, with a parallel historical interest in alchemy. By fate or happenstance, Dud runs out of gas in front of the local Lynx lodge, Lodge 49.

There, he encounters Ernie Fontaine (Brent Jennings), an industrial-plumbing salesman and lodge “knight” we've met earlier, shooing crows from his house with a BB gun. Dud, dreamy and a little dim, insists that they were meant to meet, that the two are “in cahoots.”

In the satirical smalltown comedy, the fact that everybody knows a lot about everybody else’s business doesn't mean they understand one another well; people in the community are hungry for connection even as they hold someone else at arm’s length.

The series encompasses a lot of characters — some of them eccentric — whose lives are shaped by myths and legends, from the history of the Lynx to the never-glimpsed developer called only Captain. “Lodge 49” has the quality of being mystical without mystical things actually happening. (Or do they?)

There is a kind of calm to much of the show, whether we are in the permanent dusk of the lodge’s tavern, the doughnut shop where Dud hangs out or somewhere else.

Action does erupt occasionally, but “Lodge 49” is mostly a medium-paced story driven by conversation. It isn’t slow, but it also is in no rush to give up its secrets.