A pay phone on a stick, jammed into the Arizona desert scrub. Now there’s a signifier for an era. But so is a 1970 Plymouth Duster – hood scoop, two-door, fastback; raspberry red with black rally stripes – and it shows off the throaty sound profile of the muscle car era as it power slides into a turn on this empty strip of macadam. A guy gets out, and before he even says anything, his confidence is beaming like the Arizona sun glancing off the Duster’s chrome trim. Jim Ellis (Josh Holloway) answers the ringing phone. “Where we goin’?”

There is also confidence elsewhere. The two federal agents grilling a young woman with a dismissive mix of questions and accusations are barely seen, but this is 1972, and it’s the FBI, and despite the determined patience of fresh Quantico graduate Nina Hayes (Rachel Hilson) – a learned part of her natural confidence – you know they’re white, and you know they don’t respect her. But in case you didn’t know, Duster makes their ingrained, institutional racism immediately clear. “J. Edgar Hoover hated the negro. Yet he wanted more of you in here to help infiltrate the radicals.”

In real life, the early 1970s saw the end of COINTELPRO, the Hoover-enacted secret (and largely unconstitutional) FBI program to monitor who it deemed “radicals” or “subversives,” and with the death of the first FBI director, his racist and sexist exclusions died with him. So in the early ‘70s as they’re depicted in Duster, Nina Hayes is the first Black woman to become a special agent with the bureau. Eager to be free of who they see as a problem, Nina’s questioners agree to her request for a first assignment: Phoenix, AZ, and that growing Southwestern city’s highest-profile criminal, Ezra Saxton (Keith David). When she arrives at the airport, Awan Bitsui (Asivak Koostachin), another new-ish agent, doesn’t quite know what to make of her. “Black, yes, I get that all the time.” Let’s get past it, Nina’s saying, so we can get to work.

Duster, from co-creators JJ Abrams (Alias, Fringe, and – significantly – Lost) and LaToya Morgan (Shameless, Into the Badlands), features Nina Hayes and Jim Ellis as two parts of its cops-and-criming ride, a trip that with charging Episode 1 direction from Steph Green puts the gas pedal down on an articulated version of the 1970s. And this thing feels as much like a riff on real life as it does a tribute to how the ’70s used to look on TV. Minutes after we meet him on that desert road, Jim Ellis is taking evasive action in the Duster to shake the two angry yahoos chasing him in an AMX. That’s a deep cut model of muscle car not likely seen on television since the Me Decade. And as Jim and his companion, nine-year-old Luna (Adriana Aluna Martinez), roar away to their next stop, the AMX does a corkscrewing ramp/crash that is shot from below. A visual homage to everything from The Rockford Files to the A-Team.

Was Josh Holloway born to play a handsome, easygoing dude who has spent most of his adult life as the go-to wheelman for a wide-ranging criminal operation? It seems like Duster is saying so. There are moments repeated in episode 1 where the action stops, just so characters and camera can drink in the boot-cut jeans, the unbuttoned camp collar shirt, the shoulder-length ‘do, the steady features that made Holloway’s Sawyer on Lost such a sturdy and intriguing anti-hero. And remember, it’s the seventies, so the sexual revolution is in full swing. Ellis seems to make a habit of waking up next to lovely somebodies. 

So far, we’ve seen Ellis conduct cash drops for Sax all around town, including to Phoenix PD and local establishment businesses. But he also, and this is with little Luna still in the car, picks up a human heart to be delivered to his boss’s mansion. That’s where an improvised surgical theater is set up, and that’s where Jim winds up having to help compress the failing organ in the patient’s chest. (The Pitt looked a lot different in the 1970s!) It turns out Saxton’s son Royce (Benjamin Charles Watson) has a congenital heart defect, and for Ellis, working for Sax is a family affair. Whatever the boss wants – go pick up a heart, or help a heart keep beating – that’s what the boss gets.

Ellis’s close relationship with Saxton is gonna be a problem, now that Special Agent Nina Hayes is in town. Sure, at the Phoenix field office, white majority agents like Grant (Dan Tracy) and Abbott (played by Greg Grunberg, a guarantee for any Abrams joint) push back on her aggressive posture. Whatever. She immediately sees Ellis as the bait to put Sax on her hook. Awan, with his Navajo heritage, and Jessica-Lorraine (Sofia Vassilieva), derisively referred to as “coffee girl,” quickly become Nina’s office allies, and in short order they connect the interstate transfer of a human organ to Ellis and Saxton. That’s a felony, and she has the in to secure Jim as a criminal informant. 

Right from the moment Nina climbs into the Duster without waiting for an invite, the chemistry between Hilson and Holloway burns very, very bright. “You think you’re gonna come out here and just wrap the Southwest rednecks around your finger? You got a set of onions,” Ellis tells Agent Hayes. But then his perma-grin fades into a thin pursed line. “I ain’t no snitch.” 

He would never consider working for the fuzz. Not even a “lady dick,” as Jim’s dad Wade (Corbin Bernsen) calls Hayes. But the felony threat has him in a tight spot. How old would Luna be when he finally got out of prison? And Nina has even more leverage. In another nice moment of somehow-the-seventies but also somehow not, Duster has the special agent show the criminal driver footage of what she says is proof Saxton arranged the death of Jim’s younger brother Joey. Not on her phone, and not on her tablet. This is “The 1970s,” remember? So instead, Nina has a bulky Sony U-matic videocassette player – basically the first-ever VCR – rigged to a tiny tube TV in the trunk of her FBI-issued sedan. Is that thing running off the cigarette lighter? Unclear. But the scene works, because Duster is fun and unpredictable. And Nina’s ploy works on Jim Ellis, too. 

“It’s gonna make my life dangerous,” he says, agreeing to be her CI and inform on Ezra Saxton. “Gonna do the same to you.” 

All season long we’ll track the jams Duster is kicking out, whether they’re on the 8-track player in Jim Ellis’s dash, set over comical scenes of compromising sex positions, or soundtracking Nina’s confident return to the Phoenix field office, after her criminal informant has been secured. Or as the Hollies sang on their 1972 Hot 100 single “Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress,” “Saturday night I was downtown, workin’ for the FBI…”

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.