Keith David Is So Cool
ALSO THIS WEEK: Leave Diego Luna alone
The Five Spot is a little Friday roundup where I run down my five favorite things from the week. Most of the entries will be about film and TV, but there might also be ones about weird local news or sandwiches I ate or anything else, really. The opening section is free but the rest is an exclusive for paid subscribers, so if you want to read the top four entries, you can do that by upgrading…
… riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight here.
Off we go.
FIVE: Imagine being this cool (I cannot)
Duster is one of those shows that was made in a lab to entertain me, personally. It’s got car chases and loose cannon FBI agents and a funky 1970s soundtrack. The opening credits feature Hot Wheels recreating the types of car stunts you see on the show. A recent episode featured a brief scene where the lead character — his name is Jim but I have decided to call him Duster — is depicted as a cartoon in a Wile E. Coyote homage. If you’re looking for a show to watch on Friday nights this summer, you could do a lot worse.
And if you do decide to hop into Duster, I suspect you, like me, will come out of each episode with a similar thought: Damn, Keith David is cool as hell.
Which, yes, obviously, of course Keith David is cool as hell. He’s been cool as hell for many years now. His IMDb page is littered with appearances in things you like and maybe love, dating back to a recurring role on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. He’s a legendary voice actor with dozens of credits. His name on Instagram is, I swear to god, silverthroat, which is both a nod to this history in voiceover work and something so cool that I kind of shouted a little when I discovered it while working on this paragraph. I mean, come on.
He plays a crime boss in Duster, a dude named Saxton who employs our main character — still calling him Duster — as a driver. He shows up a few times each episode in a killer suit with a collar open so wide you could perform heart surgery on him without undoing another button. If he’s outside, he has sunglasses on. If he’s inside, he might have them on, too. An episode or two ago, the show gave him a “slow motion walk while flicking away a cigarette” introduction to the action. I’m not sure I have ever seen a person look this cool in my entire life.
Some of it, again, is the wardrobe, an added benefit of the show being set in the 1970s. Which, now that I think about it, was also the decade The Nice Guys was set in, and Keith David played a cool villain in that one, too. Maybe that’s the lesson here. Maybe we should be making more movies and shows set in the 1970s where Keith David plays a stylish criminal. Maybe the next one can be a cartoon and he can add to his voice work catalog. Maybe he plays the titular supervillain in an animated series called Silverthroat. I’m still not over that part of this. I don’t know if I’ll ever be over it. There’s a lot going on here and all of it is just really, really cool.
