HBO cancels Duster, J.J. Abrams’ bad run continues

The timing for Demimonde was bad.

The high-concept sci-fi series was to star Danielle Deadwyler as a scientist whose husband and daughter would be ripped from her in a horrific accident. In order to reunite with her family, she would have to beat a conspiracy.

It had promise. It also had a $US200 million-plus price tag, and J.J. Abrams, who created the series, had reportedly held firm on the budget.

Abrams had an overall deal with Warner Bros, and Demimonde had been bought by its subsidiary HBO with a straight-to-series order in 2018.

At the time, Abrams was still riding high from the success of The Force Awakens, the first of the new Star Wars trilogy, which had earned over $US1 billion at the box office. He had just been brought back to complete the arc and was filming the third instalment, The Rise of Skywalker.

He also had so many runs on the board, with the likes of Mission: Impossible III, Super 8 and two Star Trek movies. Why wouldn’t HBO want the first TV series he’d created since 2010? This is the man who launched Lost, Alias and Felicity.

Fast forward four years to 2022 and one pandemic later, and Demimonde was done before it even got off the ground. In April, the merger between Warner Bros and Discovery had been completed, and the cost-cutting scythe was swinging with abandon through every department.

Movies that had finished filming were binned for the sake of tax write-offs, as were shows that had already been released, pulled from HBO’s streaming platform without warning. Workers were being sacked.

Demimonde was not to be saved. It was still in the early stages of pre-production, and Warner Bros didn’t like the look of that $US200 million line item.

But there was still a saving grace. Abrams had something else in the works, another TV show also for HBO. Duster, a 1970s-inspired, adrenaline-fuelled crime caper about the first Black woman in the FBI teaming up with a mob getaway driver, reunited him with Lost actor Josh Holloway.

It had been a bumpy road for Duster. It was greenlit in 2020 and filmed its pilot in 2021, which was reshot in 2023 and just as it started filming the rest of the season, the writers and actors’ strikes happened. Production was suspended for months.

Still, it was the not-so-little show that could. As Holloway told Variety of the premiere in May, “It was quite a journey. Life does that to you sometimes. J.J. called me, then Covid happened. We were finally able to shoot it, and then there were a couple of different regime changes within HBO, a couple of strikes, different pilots, and (J.J.) was like, ‘You know what, we’re still going to do this’.

“Our perseverance comes through in the show. Usually, with regime changes, they clean the slate a lot. I was proud every time we survived, because it meant they knew they had something good.”

Duster just ran out of track. Days after the season dropped its final episode earlier this week, HBO has now axed the series.

It had good buzz at launch. It was well-reviewed, and there was a genuine goodwill towards Holloway and his comeback. But after those first two weeks, you never really heard about it again. It didn’t make a dent in the cultural discourse.

It’s also another disappointment for Abrams, who has had a very bad run. What a difference a few years make.

Duster was his first TV project in over 10 years, and the first one he had been actively involved in as either a writer or director since the 2010 one-season spy series Undercovers. For someone who had been so prolific at creating compulsive serialised TV in the first decade of this century, he has been missed.

His pivot to the big screen in the 2010s was understandable, and he had carved out a role as someone who could authentically capitalise on the hunger for big commercial genre projects. Abrams knew how to make Star Trek and Star Wars appeal to a wide audience.

But The Rise of Skywalker was the last movie he made, and while it made a lot of money, more than a billion, in the six years since, its legacy is associated with a groan, often considered as more fan service than actual film, a retreat into familiar territory after backlash from some segments of the fandom to Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi.

There is something else on the horizon, though. Abrams has a secret project that started filming in April with Glen Powell, Jenna Ortega, Emma Mackey and Samuel L. Jackson. The details are tightly held, and all anyone has been able to glean is that it’s likely to be sci-fi, Abram’s favoured genre.

He needs this to work. He needs to break this bad run.