Lodge 49’s opening sequence ends in a pawn shop — maybe that’s why the show hooked me. Watching it, I was reminded of the time my aunt gave me a necklace, a family heirloom, at a moment when I was trying to scrape together the money to move out of my then-boyfriend’s room in his dad’s apartment in Malden, a working-class suburb of Boston. She helped me haggle cash-for-gold dealers into paying $500 for it — exactly the amount I needed for rent. That’s the kind of quotidian desperation that doesn’t usually make for the most compelling television, but in Lodge 49, it’s the whole point.

In the show’s opening scene, Sean Dudley (Wyatt Russell), or “Dud” as he’s known, finds a ring on the beach with his metal detector. Dud, a laid-back surfer who’s fallen on hard times after being bitten by a snake in Nicaragua and, shortly after that, having his dad die, takes the ring to a pawn shop in a strip mall.

“Found something!” he announces as he enters.