Early in Dark Winds, a new crime series from AMC, a member of the Navajo Tribal Police, driving along a dusty desert road in his patrol truck, reminds a rookie officer of the scale of what they face: “On a good day, we’ve got 50 tribal officers to patrol 27,000 square miles. You break down out here, it could be hours before someone even notices you’re missing.”
Set in the 1970s and based on the beloved “Leaphorn and Chee” series of crime novels by Tony Hillerman, Dark Winds is the latest moody miniseries in the True Detective mold. It features some of the conceits that have become common to that genre, including multiple timelines (although, in Dark Winds’s case, the flashbacks are relatively brief), vague gestures to the supernatural, and an ostensive enthusiasm for grit and accuracy.
The show was created by Graham Roland, a TV writer and producer of Chickasaw heritage who worked on Prison Break and Jack Ryan. Robert Redford and Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin, a friend of the late Hillerman, are on as producers. The creators were keen to make the series culturally authentic, and it has a mainly Native American cast and all-Native writing room, as well as sporadic Navajo (Diné) dialogue.
The show opens with two strange and, we come to suspect, interrelated events. First, armed men brutally rob an armored car, then escape by helicopter somewhere into Navajo territory. A few weeks later, an elderly man and young girl are found dead in a motel room. Both are Native, and the only witness to their deaths is a blind woman who speaks only Navajo. There are signs in the room that some kind of spiritual ritual had been taking place.
Joe Leaphorn (Zahn McClarnon), a lieutenant in the Navajo police and our protagonist, comes to investigate. He knows the deceased girl’s family and feels a personal stake in solving the case, though he’s struggling with limited resources — several of his officers have enlisted to fight in Vietnam — and jurisdictional problems. He has an uneasy working relationship with a slippery and callous local FBI agent, Whitover (Noah Emmerich), who is more interested in solving the armored car heist than the murders of some Native Americans. Things get further complicated when, not long after the heist and the hotel killings, a Mormon tourist family passing through the reservation goes missing.
Leaphorn’s colleagues in the Navajo Tribal Police include a hardworking, standoffish female sergeant, Bernadette Manuelito (Jessica Matten), and a seemingly snooty college boy, Jim Chee (Kiowa Gordon), who drives a sports car and shows up to his first day of work in a suit. “You look like Pat Boone,” Bernadette tells him.
Joe and his wife, Emma Leaphorn (Deanna Allison), are grieving the loss of a son who died in an oil drilling accident; she blames him for their son’s death. Emma is a nurse and midwife at a Bureau of Indian Affairs hospital. She encounters a pregnant teenage girl (Elva Guerra), who, she suspects, is the victim of abuse. (She also warns the girl, in Navajo, that if she gives birth in the hospital, the white doctor will sterilize her afterward without her permission.)
Rounding out the characters are a local Catholic priest (Jeremiah Bitsui), an evangelical auto salesman (a nicely cast Rainn Wilson from The Office), and a Vietnam veteran-turned-anti-government militant (Eugene Brave Rock). Suffice to say that, of course, none are quite who they seem. The acting is generally strong. Zahn McClarnon, in particular, seems destined for further big roles.
In keeping with the tone of prestige TV, the six-episode miniseries is heavy on atmospherics and boasts some lush cinematography of the Southwest setting. Yet, as Daniel Fienberg writes in the Hollywood Reporter, the show “leaves the period setting, with its pervasive threat of Vietnam, nestled between the founding of the American Indian Movement and the incident at Wounded Knee, so indistinct that other than the absence of cell phones, some viewers won’t even notice.”
The main characters are nicely drawn, and there are some good moments of action and drama, but the show is hampered by an uneven script. For a suspense series, the denouement leaves a lot to be desired, and viewers may struggle with a sense that things don’t totally cohere. The supernatural elements also feel inconsistent and muddled.
Nonetheless, I enjoyed spending time with these characters and in this setting, and I suspect other viewers will as well. Hopefully, this slightly disappointing first season means the show has gotten its sea legs and will return richer and more durable.
J. Oliver Conroy’s writing has been published in the Guardian, New York magazine, the Spectator, the New Criterion, and other publications.
