To narrow this down there's a couple other things I've tried.
I've tried removing the "schema" object and changing my services layer to return a simple array of strings, as well as trying a simple array of objects with the fieldname as the key. No luck.
Also worth noting that I'm also using the filter row.
Additionally, there are no errors being thrown in the console.
And since probably the first thing anybody is going to think is that something's up with my closures, this is what I see when I use angular to inspect the variables at runtime:
filterable: { cell: { operator: "contains", showOperators: true, suggestionOperator: "contains" }, dataSource: { filter: [], schema: { data: "data", model: { fields: { lastName: { type: "string" }, id: "lastName" } }, total: "total" }, transport: { read: { dataType: "json", type: "GET", url: "/api/Employee/Field/LastName" } }, type: "aspnetmvc-ajax" }, multi: true}