After years of anticipation, Duster won’t be returning for a second season. HBO Max has officially canceled the 1970s-set crime drama from J.J. Abrams and LaToya Morgan, just days after the Season 1 finale aired.
The cancellation doesn’t come as a total surprise. While Duster received strong reviews—earning a 92% critic score and 83% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes—the series failed to gain significant traction in terms of viewership. Despite holding steady in HBO Max’s daily Top 10, the show never cracked Nielsen’s Top 10 for original streaming series and only managed to hit #50 on Luminate’s streaming chart in its fourth week.
Set in 1972, Duster followed Nina (Rachel Hilson), the first Black female FBI agent, as she heads to the Southwest and teams up with a reckless getaway driver named Jim (Josh Holloway) in an effort to dismantle a burgeoning crime syndicate. The series blended high-stakes action with period-specific grit, aiming to carve out a unique space in the crowded TV crime drama landscape.
In a statement, HBO Max said, “While HBO Max will not be moving forward with a second season of Duster, we are so grateful to have had the chance to work with the amazingly talented co-creators J.J. Abrams and LaToya Morgan, and our partners at Bad Robot and Warner Bros. Television. We are tremendously proud of this series led by Josh Holloway and Rachel Hilson and we thank them along with our cast and crew for their incredible collaboration and partnership.”
Despite the cancellation, both Warner Bros. Television and Abrams’ Bad Robot attempted to shop the show to other platforms. However, those efforts didn’t yield a new home for the adrenaline-fueled drama.
The ensemble cast also included Keith David, Sydney Elisabeth, Greg Grunberg, Camille Guaty, Asivak Koostachin, Adriana Aluna Martinez, and Benjamin Charles Watson. The first two episodes were co-written by Abrams and Morgan and directed by Steph Green, who also served as an executive producer alongside Abrams, Morgan, and Rachel Rusch Rich.
Warner Bros. Television echoed the sentiment, stating: “J.J. Abrams and LaToya Morgan delivered a thrilling, multi-dimensional crime drama in Duster, with textured characters that took the audience back to the 1970s in a new and innovative way… While we wish this journey could continue, we are thankful to our partners at HBO Max for the opportunity to tell Jim and Nina’s story.”
Originally ordered back in April 2020, Duster took a long road to the screen, but ultimately its story ends here. Meanwhile, HBO Max is moving forward with other programming, including today’s greenlight of Stuart Fails to Save the Universe, a spinoff of The Big Bang Theory, also from Warner Bros. Television.