Exclusive: <em>Duster</em> Looks Like the Most Badass Show of the Summer

Across a film and TV career brimming with fantastical storytelling, there was one image J.J. Abrams could not shake from his head. The Star Trek and Star Wars director saw a phone booth in the desert, and a man getting out of a car to pick it up. Sure, it's a simple scene, and certainly a far cry from the spaceships and monsters Abrams spent the last decade and a half dealing with on the big screen. Yet it begged for clarity. Who is the man? Who is calling him? And most importantly: What's the car he's driving?

They were all questions Abrams needed to answer—so much so that it led to his return to the small screen: Duster, premiering May 15 on Max. In an exclusive with Esquire in concert with the trailer premiere, co-creators and co-showrunners Abrams and LaToya Morgan (The Walking Dead, Into the Badlands) pop open the hood on Duster, their slick new '70s-inspired action/crime drama starring Rachel Hilson and Josh Holloway.

Set in 1972, Duster follows an unlikely duo in Nina (Hilson), an ambitious individual who makes history as the first Black woman to become an FBI agent, and a hotshot getaway driver named Jim (Holloway), whose steed of choice is a custom Plymouth Duster. The two team up to take down a crime syndicate across the scorching deserts of the American southwest.

"Duster is about a clash of opposites," Morgan explains. "It's about people from opposite worlds that come together under crazy circumstances, and are forced to work together. We watch their relationship grow over the course of the [first] season."

"All I had was the title, the vision of the phone booth and being a fan of Josh Holloway," J.J. Abrams wrote via email. "When I called him with this seed of an idea and he said yes, that was when I started looking for someone to do this with. Finding LaToya was a dream come true. We have such different life experiences, but we have so much in common. We both could feel the potential in what this might be."

You can watch a new trailer for Duster below.

Duster takes loose inspiration from real life. The first Black woman to become a special agent in the FBI was Sylvia Mathis, who joined the agency in 1976. Morgan acknowledges that Mathis played a part in the creation of Nina, but she wasn't the only one. "I thought of my own mother," Morgan says. "We built her out of whole cloth, drawn from our friends, our families. It was trying to drill down into this tenacious young [woman]. She's like a bulldog with a bone. She will not let go of this case, and is willing to break a few rules."

The other half of the show is Holloway, playing a role Morgan calls a classic "ne'er-do-well." "This guy thrives on speed," Morgan says. "He loves being in tight spots and figuring out ways to get out of them. He's a trouble magnet in the best way." (Morgan is also an unabashed Lost fan. "He'll always be Sawyer to me," she jokes of Holloway.)

Where Nina was an amalgamation of real, tough-as-nails women, Jim is carved out of the imagination of the Hollywood New Wave, when masculine outlaws led fast and furious lives. "We talked a ton about Steve McQueen," says Morgan. "The cool cars, the badassery of him in movies like Bullit. We talked about him in this crime family. We used The Godfather as one of our touchstones. We talked Fairlight View and Paper Moon."

Of course, no getaway driver is complete without their getaway car. Central to Duster's identity is its namesake, the Plymouth Duster, which Morgan says was chosen for its reputation amongst gearheads and short-lived production run. "We wanted a car that was iconic," she says.

Citing Bond's Aston Martin, McQueen's Mustang GT, and General Lee and KITT, Morgan and Abrams strive to introduce the Duster as TV's next holy grail hot wheel. "We wanted ours to be different," says Morgan. "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."

"I was always a fan of the Duster logo, and it felt like the kind of car that deserved a spotlight," adds Abrams. "It was a perfect fit for the series, but also for Josh personally."

"It feels like a distinctly ’70s show from the ground-up," Abrams tells Esquire. "We loved its analog nature. It also seemed to open doors to some ridiculous, larger than life and really fun characters that probably would feel out of place in a present day setting."

Between its grounded inspirations from real people—including ex-FBI agent Jerri Williams, who consultated over the operations of the bureau at the time—and the everlasting imagination of the 1970s, Duster is primed to go full throttle on our streaming queues. Still, the show's heart is its mystery, which is that of a stranger driving across a wide-open landscape, and someone waiting on the other line.

"[Abrams] liked the mystery of that," says Morgan. "There was something fun about a character like Jim where he had to be the driver, the propulsive force that gets the story moving. It was about getting back to the fun of all those shows from back in the day. The Fall Guy and Starsky & Hutch. No cell phones, no social media. You actually had to have real conversations."

"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," Abrams continues. "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."