Finding human connection in a dark TV landscape
“So this is a refreshing break from shows about darkness and connecting with antiheroes who do grotesque things?” my editor asked when I enthused about the delightful new AMC series Lodge 49, due Aug. 6.
That’s exactly right. This show is an original, a comic drama about kindness.
In the context of most current TV — where dystopias, asocial superheroes and moral ambiguity are Emmy catnip — a show about how ordinary people not only survive but elevate the daily grind feels revolutionary. It’s like emerging from a dark wood (interesting, but dark) into a clearing, where suddenly you can see a million stars and the air smells like flowers.
Sean “Dud” Dudley is lost. (He’s played by Wyatt Russell, the son of Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn, as a millennial version of Jeff Bridges’ shaggy Dude from The Big Lebowski.) For a brief time, Dud had all he wanted: Living in Long Beach, Calif., he surfed in the mornings, worked by day in his dad’s pool-supply shop and barbecued in the evening with his funny twin sister Liz (Sonya Cassidy).
One by one those things fell away, and Dud was left adrift and unsure.
Then a series of events leads Dud to Lynx Lodge 49, a throwback social club with quasi-chivalrous underpinnings (think Masons or Elks, but more shambolic), where he may find all that he’s looking for.
There’s a gently crazy, Fisher King-esque subplot about alchemy and secret scrolls, but that’s just a metaphor; the treasure here is the characters, every one of them both ordinary and fascinating — like Blaise, a pot dealer whose outward chill masks deep sadness (played by David Pasquesi, so wonderfully smarmy as Selina’s ex-husband on Veep); and Connie, a smalltime journalist whose throbs of yearning are palpable (played by Linda Emond, an amazing stage actress who stole Mike Nichols’ New York production of Death of a Salesman from both Philip Seymour Hoffman and Andrew Garfield).
The show’s creator, Jim Gavin, is new to me, but he has hit upon something we need to be reminded of, especially now: That good people dealt a tough hand can wash up on the same shore, where their connection can grow into something rich, if they’re open to it.
Other series have tried this. Kevin (Probably) Saves the World, starring Jason Ritter, had a hero who was drafted by angels to fend off Armageddon by performing acts of kindness — a fine idea, but weighed down by stakes that were too big. ABC cancelled it in May after just one season.
Alan Ball asked a similar question on Six Feet Under — “What do we do with our limited time together?” — and answered it, brilliantly. But his recent attempt to explore interconnectedness, Here and Now, starring Tim Robbins and Holly Hunter, was swamped by self-seriousness. Everyone was just too damn sad.
More successful is HBO’s High Maintenance, where a marijuana dealer known simply as The Guy (series cocreator Ben Sinclair) is a nearly invisible connecting force between all kinds of New Yorkers.
The show appears delightfully unstructured, but random encounters are actually the point.
We do live in a world where a Hasidic man questioning his faith can have a life-changing encounter with a gay nightclub performer (episode 204), or strangers watching an eclipse can bond over witnessing a marriage proposal (episode 210).
We just don’t usually make television about it.
What keeps High Maintenance and Lodge 49 from being cloying is that their humour flows from an undercurrent of pain and sadness, and their miracles are just ordinary acts of kindness.
At one point, a Lodge member says, “Haven’t you noticed? Everyone is weird all the time.” Gavin noticed, and made a show about it.
Some connections begin with nothing more than mutual loneliness — but if the alchemy is right, you still get gold.
Lodge 49 plays around with the idea that there is an interconnectedness to the universe.
And then it shows us that there is: it’s us.