LaToya Morgan remembers the day J.J. Abrams came up with the first scene of Duster, their new ‘70s-set crime drama co-created for HBO Max. They’d sat down to review a couple of scripts Morgan had written, and he described to her an image that he couldn’t get out of his head: a muscle car drives up to a lone phone booth in the middle of the desert, and out steps Josh Holloway to answer the ringing phone. Except that Abrams hadn’t just come up with that image — he’d had it in his head for 20 years. And it wasn’t until Morgan showed him her script for a neo-western crime thriller that Abrams found the perfect outlet.
“He was like, ‘That’s all I got. I don't know what's going on. What else? Anything else in there?" Morgan says. So they got to work building a concept for a show. Once they figured out a premise — a criminal getaway driver “on a collision course with this really tenacious up-and-coming FBI agent fresh out of Quantico” — they knew there was only one choice for the star: Lost star Josh Holloway.
