Stream: Lodge 49

An aimless ex-surfer with a snake-bitten bum leg and dreams of reopening his dead dad’s pool-cleaning business limps into a fraternal order way past its prime. This is the joke-played-straight setup for Lodge 49, a deceptively deep dramedy about heroic quests in the age of numbing economic inequality. You’ve probably never heard of this show, now quietly approaching the end of its shambolic second season on AMC (perhaps its last, if the internet death knells are any indication). I almost missed it myself. But due to a coincidence that the show’s main character Dud (human golden retriever Wyatt Russell) would ascribe as fate, a blurb on some TV critic’s Top 10 list steered me to the first season on Hulu last year, when I was feeling the same this can’t be it ennui that courses through Lodge 49‘s paycheck-to-paycheck protagonists: Ernie (a sad-eyed Brent Jennings), a divorced plumbing supplies salesman whose simple desires for companionship and stability are frustratingly out of reach; Dud’s scrappy sister Liz (a magnificently real Sonya Cassidy), drowning in her father’s debt and masking her rage with a defiant cool that deserves its own fan club; and Connie, an old-school reporter witnessing the demise of print journalism and experiencing mysterious vertigo spells that may also be visions propelling her deeper into the mystery surrounding “the true lodge.”

But that’s the thing about this weirdly zen show—everything potentially magic about it is also blithely mundane, forcing its characters to confront the same question: When you finally realize you’ll never get what you were promised, what do you do next?