Reservation Dogs is a reminder comedy has serious roots

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https://time.com/6202872/reservation-dogs-fx/

BY ANDREW R. CHOW
AUGUST 2, 2022 5:01 PM EDT

While brainstorming funny scenes for the second season of his FX comedy series Reservation Dogs, Sterlin Harjo turned to the memory of his grandmother’s deathbed.

It’s not that Harjo was callous about her death—far from it. He had sat by the ailing matriarch for a week with his extended family before she died, 11 years ago. While she slept, they sang songs and swapped stories into the wee hours of the morning. When she finally roused one day for a cup of coffee, they sat around, cracking jokes and making her laugh.

When she died a couple of days later, Harjo grieved, but he also felt a sense of closure. “It’s a beautiful way to go: having a community that loves you, singing for you, helping you as you exit this place,” Harjo said during a Zoom interview from his Tulsa, Okla., office. “It brings out these better versions of who we are.”

For Season 2 of Reservation Dogs, Harjo and actor-writer Devery Jacobs co-wrote an episode based on this experience. In the episode, the show’s rural Oklahoma Native community—inspired by Harjo’s own Oklahoma upbringing—comes together to surround an elder in her last days. For such a heavy topic, it’s surprisingly funny and uplifting, with filthy jokes told, truces gently forged, and strong, idiosyncratic voices arising from every corner of the room. It’s this penchant for bold, communal storytelling—buoyed by themes and story lines that might seem counterintuitive to mainstream audiences—that makes Reservation Dogs one of the most compelling shows on television. And its arrival has coincided with other Native stories thriving on the small screen, from the Peacock sitcom Rutherford Falls to AMC’s thriller Dark Winds.

Critics, fans, and film icons have agreed on Reservation Dogs’ quality and originality: it won Peabody and Gotham Awards and received the “universal acclaim” tag on Metacritic. Following the show’s snub at the announcement of this year’s Emmy nominations on July 12, Guillermo del Toro tweeted, “Nominated or not, RESERVATION DOGS is one of the best things on the tube.”

But Harjo isn’t making Reservation Dogs for the accolades. He wants to use it to tell real stories, and to give other Native filmmakers a pathway to success. He wants to do for his Oklahoma what Matt Damon and Ben Affleck did for South Boston in Good Will Hunting, he says: to lift up a community that most outsiders hadn’t considered worthy of heroic main characters. And he’s doing it by integrating his collaborators and community into the process in ways that few creators do. His unorthodox approach might serve as a template for other underrepresented groups as they strive to generate lasting growth, respect, and success through nuanced representation onscreen.

“We can’t leave it up to Hollywood to give people the opportunity, because they don’t know these people,” Harjo says. “We are part of this community, and it makes everything better if I bring people along.”