He is the creator, executive producer, and showrunner of Damnation, a neo-western period drama about the labor wars in America during the 1930s that aired on USA Network and on Netflix outside the US.
[7] Publisher's Weekly wrote "Tost's work synthesizes 20th-century avant-garde strategies, from Objectivist and Black Mountain poetics through language writing and conceptual poetry, with nods to Emerson and deconstruction.
Critic Joshua Scheiderman wrote that Tost's book "ultimately belongs in the long, rich tradition of texts like Constance Rourke’s American Humor: A Study of the National Character (1931) and Greil Marcus’s The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (1997), ostensibly academic studies of American culture but also works of mythopoesis in their own right.
His script "The Olympian" about Brad Alan Lewis's quest for the 1984 Olympics was selected for the 2016 Black List ranking of the film industry's best unproduced screenplays.
[17] The Hollywood Reporter wrote, "Tost incorporates the wide-open spaces, cultural conflicts and endemic lawlessness typical to Westerns, while inverting conventional expectations by foregrounding Native American perspectives on some of the film’s thornier social issues.
"[18] Critic Simon Thompson added, "With calm confidence and a natural balance, writer-director Tony Tost strikes gold with this darkly comic crime thriller that hits every target it aims for.