By: Eric Francisco
April 30, 2025
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.”
Morgan is represented by WME and attorney Rob Szymanski.