It’s become a cliché to ask about a TV drama, “What are the stakes?” Often the question embodies an assumption: that a story can’t be worth your time unless it’s explosive and dire. Who gets killed? What’s everybody fighting over? How big are the dragons?

“Lodge 49,” an affable, idiosyncratic comic drama starting Monday on AMC, is by this standard low-stakes, and blissfully so.

This is not to say there’s nothing of interest in it. It involves, for starters: alchemy, a mummy, financial subterfuge, Paracelsus, economic decline, surfing and more than the usual amount of Latin.

But the show starts from the understanding that “stakes” don’t need to be pointy to matter. You care about a drama because you care about the people in it. And “Lodge 49,” about the collection of beautiful losers in a threadbare fraternal society in Long Beach, Calif., is bursting with reasons to care.