One of the problems afflicting this current Golden Age of Television is that there are so many networks producing so much new work that it is impossible to find some of the things that you want to watch. In the old days, TV Guide told readers what was on television on all three networks and where to find it. But with the proliferation of streaming services, on-demand, and four or five-hundred channels, the slim periodical, something you would pick up in the check-out line at the grocery store, would have to be the size of a telephone book. (And who uses telephone books nowadays.) The inevitable outcome is that programs that you would like to watch get lost in the scrum and, if you remember to watch them, they can't be found. The general assumption today is that anything you want to watch can be found somewhere on TV or on-line -- but this assumption is untrue. After reading glowing reviews of the Thomas Pynchon-inspired Lodge 49, I periodically searched for the show on Netflix or On-Demand -- but I could never find the program listed anywhere on the on-screen guides on my TV and, so, I wasn't able to watch the program. (No doubt someone better-versed in computers or TV could find the nook or cranny where the show was secreted -- but I never found that location.) A couple days ago, I saw a review of the second season of Lodge 49 on-line. To my surprise, and annoyance, the show has been screening since August and will air its last episode on October 14 on AMC. Fortunately, past episodes from Series 2 are available on my TV in the"on-demand" feature and I have been able to watch four episodes of the show. The way programs are archived in "On Demand" is inscrutable and it's not clear to me that the show's programs will remain posted in that place long enough for me to watch the ten episodes -- I hope the programs will remain available for, at least, another week, but who knows?
Lodge 49 on the evidence of the four episodes that I have watched is a rambling, low-key entertainment that is brilliantly written, with excellent acting, and a diffuse, if interesting, narrative arc. On first viewing, the second series seems an arcane variation on the Coen brothers' The Big Lebowski with an ex-surfer, shaggy-looking pool maintenance man named "Dud" standing in for "the Dude". The influence of the Coen brothers on popular entertainment can not be overestimated -- traces of their work is everywhere now in the "edgy" crime shows and family melodramas on TV: HBO has been mining the Coen brothers catalog this year with The Righteous Gemstones about a family of TV evangelists and, similarly, Showtime's How to be a God in Southern Florida (about pyramid-selling schemes) would be unthinkable without the Coens having shown the way, so to speak, for these kinds of serio-comic, wise-ass "shaggy dog" TV series. After a couple episodes of Lodge 49, however, it becomes clear that the show is considerably stranger and more Pynchonesque than the standard Coen brothers knock-off. After all, the characters in Lodge 49 discourse, at length, about alchemy and Carl Jung -- one of the protagonists is engaged in the magnum opus, that is, using the "philosophical egg" to transmute base metals into gold. As it turns out, the "gold" here may be bitcoin and the "golden scrolls" that some of the characters are seeking may be an algorithm unlocking the computer programs that control the cryptocurrency. The plot lines are complex with multiple narrative trajectories: Dud's father owned a pool maintenance business in Long Beach, California where the show is set. He has died and his business been destroyed. Dud tries to revive the family business with his sister Liz. Liz goes to work as a manager at a sinister restaurant called "High Steaks" -- really more of a cult that a steakhouse. Ernie, a sad-eyed old African-American man, works at plumbing supply company -- he's a "road man", that is traveling salesman, who has been forced into a desk job. (His manically optimistic boss is an old man who is taking a poetry class on-line and prone to quoting Yeats and Keats.) El Confidante is Mexican-American con man (played wonderfully by Cheech Marin) who believes that the Lodge's missing scrolls have been hidden in Mexico in the village of Comala. (Comala is the literal "ghost-town" in Juan Rulfo's cult novel Pedro Paramo --the show is rife with hundreds of allusions to esoterica: Lodge 49 itself derives from Thomas Pynchon's short and paranoid novel The Crying of Lot 49.) There are side-plots about the magnum opus and scenes that I don't understand, seemingly set in England, in which a blindfolded woman recites poetry -- the woman is a journalist and, in the third episode, speaks a heartbreaking aria about her hopes as a young woman and how she feels now about that other self as she faces her death. The show is filled with weird coincidences and strange encounters. In the opening of the second series two, Liz meets a homeless man on a beach, gives him three dollars, and, then, has to take the money back since she remembers she has nothing in her purse and no way to get home from the beach by bus without some money. The scene is indelibly acted, contains a violent chase sequence, and, ultimately, appears to go nowhere, although I question whether any shot in this labyrinthine program isn't somehow connected with something (or everything) else -- after all, the characters belong a lodge that calls its members "Lynx" (that is, "links"); here everything is hyperlinked.
The connective tissue in the show is a secret society, the moribund Lodge 49 to which the major characters belong. The lodge consists of s decrepit meeting room, a hidden library, and a bar where most of the action takes place. Secret tunnels infiltrate the lodge -- people sometimes emerge from underground. The lodge seems to be haunted by a former Grand Master or Lodge leader, Larry and has a juke-box with strange and old songs on it. (In one scene, the characters use lemons to buy drinks since they have no other money -- this sequence is later referenced as emblematic of all currency; you define something as having value and, then, use it as mode of exchange as in bitcoin or other crypto-currencies.) The show sometimes breaks into odd musical interludes, music serving as a kind of reverie or seizure as in David Lynch's movies. The dialogue is all hyperlinked -- densely allusive and referential: as an example, at one point a young woman, who is pretending to be a "law provider" (for some reason, the word "lawyer" is off-limits) says she met a boyfriend in a "Esoterica chatroom" on the "Voynich Manuscript." Dialogue constantly cites literature, mostly Nietzsche and Cervantes -- one subtext is the "impossible dream", presumably the magnum opus, and Ernie is imagined to be Don Quixote to Dud's Sancho Panza. Paul Giamati is a producer and he appears from time time, playing an author like Robert Ludlam or Robert Patterson, the creator of innumerable violent spy fantasy-novels that the characters all seem to be reading or listening to on the audio-books. He's an enigmatic presence that flits through the program; his role never exactly becoming clear although, it appears, that he is increasingly important in the latter episodes of series two.
As the program develops, it seems apparent that the series tracks, at least, three different cults -- there is a high end restaurant called High Steaks owned by a woman who seems to have drifted in the culinary arts from the milieu of self-help TED talks, all breathless and narcissistic enthusiasm; Ernie works at plumbing supply company where the men talk in code and are (mostly) collegial -- another sort of lodge. Of course, the titular Lodge 49 with its hidden rooms, weird emblematic images, and legendary founder is the secret society that seems the model on which the others are erected. Several other organizations have a similar structure -- there is a pyramid scheme business that peddles skin-care products comprised of "fire and water" and a military aerospace contract Orbus that also has a shadowy presence in some of the episodes. The Lodge may have had something with Orbus' military-industrial contracting. (A pawn shop in the strip mall where Dud has his pool service business serves as the repository of plot developments that have a deus ex machina element -- the tight-lipped owner of the pawnshop with his silent Hispanic helper provide banking services for the characters, float people loans when money is needed, and seem to be a surrogate for the divine: the pawn shop owner serves as lawyer and judge with respect to some of the disputes shown in the show.) .
After watching seven episodes, I can report that the series alternates between melodramatic, almost self-indulgent narratives about family trauma, lost love, broken relationships, and other sorts of misery -- these backstory narratives drive the characters and account for their peculiar neediness and their compensatory eccentricities. This sort of material is not generally to my liking -- it's over-simplified in that it draws a straight causal connection between things that may be correlated in some way but are not necessarily induced by the trauma (or memory of trauma) represented. In Lodge 49, this sentimental or melodramatic stuff -- generally displayed in the form of long emotional dialogues or people proclaiming to one another how they will change their lives -- is well done, but a little repetitive and dull. The visionary stuff, by comparison, is always interesting if overly motivated by the adjacent melodrama. Episode six involving complicated flashbacks to the fifties, several odd sequences in what appears to be a huge soundstage that is redolent of Synecdoche, New York, and a whole series of dreamlike scenes involving burrowing, infected wounds, breaking through walls, and falling is an impressive accomplishment - visions nested in visions. A little bit of this visionary and hallucinatory material goes a long way and the show is probably wise to interpolate melodrama with the more remarkable and bizarre subject matter. Too long, like most mini-series, the show is nonetheless well worth watching and I am crossing my fingers that I will somehow be able to see all ten episodes.
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