Jim Gavin's sadly truncated characterful odyssey Lodge 49 is a really beautiful bit of television - a grandly eclectic musical score (their music supervisor was the editor of Shindig! Magazine), a magnificent cast and some truly bold set pieces make it one of the more interesting shows of the era but it is inconsistent. Tonally it's something akin to a Coen brothers' approximation of the allegorical "John From Cincinnati"- with semi-mythical coincidences and strange occurrences mingling with everyday drama and human pain.
There are some really strong moments here but the pacing can drift into the glacial and the fundamental issue with portraying groups of people who meander through life looking for meaning is that this listlessness also seeps into the episodes themselves. Looking back across the two seasons it's sometimes hard to see the justification for whole chunks of it, but when it does coalesce into something it can be legitimately breathtaking.
The backbone of the show is the "knight and squire" relationship between Jennings & Russell - the evergreen latter now making well-deserved waves in the Marvel omniverse. The whole cast is glorious though from the magnetically listless Sonya Cassidy to David "Knifeman" Pasquesi's starry-eyed apothecary to the magnificent Bruce Campbell and the deeply underrated Adam Godley. There's a strange existential melancholy to a prematurely cancelled show - a public story perennially unfinished - that sort of works for Lodge 49 and the Lynx lodge and its cultish trappings will stay with me for a long time.
