Here's a good review of Lodge 49 from EW. I love how the snarky writer calls AMC the "Walking Dead network."
"There’s something so cruel about California’s beauty. A lot of somethings, actually: Sundappled beaches alongside skyrocketing housing costs, short miles gridlocking long hours into eternal rush hour, boom industries fading, culturally profound neighborhoods gentrifying, rains that won’t come, fires that will.
AMC’s Lodge 49 is one of the brightest-looking shows on TV. It’s set in a Long Beach, Calif., a port city imagined with radiant ocean blues and golf course greens. Wyatt Russell stars as nomadic ex-surfer Dud, and Russell himself is one California Dream: seafoam shirt, perpetual flip-flops, blonde Dennis Wilson beard framed by golden Beach Jesus locks, that wild hair atop a lanky-tall frame collectively suggesting palm tree topped with sunshine fronds. But Dud is suffering, and so is his whole world. On Lodge 49, the good life is right here but long gone, a beach with a full parking lot, a job you just got fired from.
Last year, a snake bit Dud’s ankle, and his wound hasn’t healed. That origin sentence fell-swoops three flavors of myth: Edenic serpent, Achilles’ foot problems, the Fisher King maimed in perpetual agony. Lodge 49 isn’t quite a supernatural series, but Dud’s injury implicitly extends to (or reflects back from) a broken society around him. Dud’s father died on a mysterious swim, leaving his sister Liz (Sonya Cassidy) to inherit Dad’s crippling debt. Death plus debt closed the family’s pool supply store, now an empty storefront awaiting tenants: Right here, long gone. And Long Beach suffers. Aerospace factories and office parks go empty from layoffs. Oil derricks dot the landscape, leftover from half-remembered booms. Billboards around town ask “Is There Another Way To Live?” It’s an advertisement for redevelopment, maybe, or maybe the answer is just “No.”
Dud’s life changes when he discovers the Ancient and Benevolent Order of the Lynx, a Freemason-ish society with headquarters in London and a spiritual philosophy rooted in alchemy. The local Lynx outpost, Lodge 49, was once a bustling community center. Now it’s fallen on hard times, its membership middle-aged and jobless. But the first wonderful thing about Lodge 49 is how seriously it takes the unifying possibility of even the most broken community. The Lodge has a bar, and ceremonies the members all celebrate even while they smirk at the mysticism. There is a recurring Band Night where a local harbor patrolman plays surf rock with an outfit called Don Fab and the Longshoreman.
Dud very Holy Fool-ishly falls under the Lodge’s spell. Two other characters have more complicated perspectives. His Lynx “mentor” is Ernie (Brent Jennings), a 59-year-old industrial plumbing salesman. A lifetime jobber in the line of work Arthur Miller wrote American tragedies about, Ernie’s on the hunt for a big score. His quest follows that redevelopment, those billboards, and a mysterious local business tycoon only known as “Captain.” In Lodge 49‘s playful-sincere treatment, the Pursuit of a Real Big Toilet Supply Sale has become a season-long mytharc. When Ernie finds Captain in episode 8, he declares: “Here I am at the center of the maze!” That could be a line from Westworld or Legion, but only on Lodge 49 does a metaphorical maze end with Bruce Campbell in a kiddie pool pouring himself a Blood Mary under the desert sun.
Jennings, a journeyman actor in everything since the ’80s, is fabulous. Ernie could just be the buddy-cop superego opposite Dud’s id, but the more you watch Lodge 49, the more you suspect he’s the real hero. He’s got the romantic subplot, a renewed affair with his long-ago high school sweetheart Connie (Linda Emond). Connie’s a Lynx. So is her husband, Scott (Eric Allan Kramer), who also happens to be Ernie’s main competition for the job of Sovereign Protector, the fancy Lynx term for Lodge chieftain.
