Tony Tost’s crime stories and westerns make room for rural Americans and outsiders. We welcome the sympathy, but Americana exposes a weakness for dialogue that announces eccentricity rather than letting the actors do their work.
Fi1m perspective
In Americana (2025), a Native American Ghost Shirt brings together outsiders in rural South Dakota. Tony Tost wants to make their predicament funny without making fools of them, and that sympathy is worth having in a crime western. The result is watchable rather than fully convincing: the actors do better work than the dialogue, while the handling of violence sometimes undermines his concern for the people involved. We grew impatient with the script’s repeated insistence that everyone announce their eccentricity.
His television work began with Longmire (2012), where he was a writer and producer. Robert Taylor gives that series a quiet authority its familiar police work does not always earn. Tost then created and ran Damnation (2017), taking his interest in the western into a drama set in the 1930s. There is a consistent attraction here to rural and working-class lives, though the choice of people and places does not by itself make a story distinctive.
Poker Face (2023) is the more persuasive company, thanks chiefly to Natasha Lyonne’s warmth and the pleasure of watching a killer get caught. Tost became showrunner for the second series in 2025, working on Rian Johnson’s creation rather than starting from scratch. Our enthusiasm for the programme, with reservations about a few dawdling cases, should not be mistaken for a verdict on his contribution alone. It does suggest a good home for a writer who favours economical scenes and giving actors room to add their own detail.
His background in experimental poetry also informs an interest in images and in the way scenes sit beside one another. He describes a working method of cutting long scenes down repeatedly, from the page through to the edit. That makes Americana, his first feature as writer-director, a useful test: with more control, his humour survives, but so do lines that need another pass. For his next feature, we would rather he trusted his actors than supplied them with quite so many eccentricities to announce.
Biography
Tony Tost (born 27 July 1975) is an American screenwriter, film director, producer and poet. He was born in Springfield, Missouri and grew up in Enumclaw, Washington. He holds degrees from Green River Community College, College of the Ozarks and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Arkansas, and began his career as a poet with collections including Invisible Bride (2004) and Complex Sleep (2007).
Tost moved into television writing in the 2010s. His credits include multiple episodes of Longmire (2012–2016), for which he also served as producer; The Terror (2018–2019); and creating and showrunning Damnation (2017–2018). He was showrunner and executive producer for the second season of Poker Face (2025) and made his feature directorial debut with Americana (2023), which he also wrote.
