For audiences who thrill to identity-based scorekeeping, FX on Hulu’s Reservation Dogs offers a veritable feast of delights. The product of an all-native writers’ room, the series employs indigenous directors exclusively and features an almost entirely native cast. Unlike 1955’s Oklahoma!, shot in Arizona and Culver City, California, the show was filmed wholly on location in the Sooner State and captures many a gently rolling vista. So ardent is the program’s quest for verisimilitude, in fact, that one is almost disappointed to learn that three of its four leads hail from Canada. Apparently, even the most scrupulous of authenticity mavens must occasionally make compromises for the sake of art.
Reservation Dogs stars newcomer D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai as Bear Smallhill, a clever young man who lives with his mother in Muscogee Nation territory. Along with fellow teenagers Elora Danan (Devery Jacobs), Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis), and Cheese (Lane Factor), Bear belongs to the gang of small-time troublemakers that gives the series its name. Like any number of adolescent hellions before them, the Rez Dogs make up for indiscipline with a certain unsophisticated sweetness. Having stolen, in the show’s opening scene, a delivery truck full of Flaming Flamers potato chips, the teenagers negotiate with their fence to hang on to the merchandise.
Feeding their snack habit is not, it turns out, the sum of the Reservation Dogs’s ambition. Far away to the west, summoning Bear and company like a gold-rush dream, lies California, land of opportunity, wealth, and unlimited adventure. (The gang has clearly not heard about the lockdown hypocrisy or confiscatory taxation.) Because a fifth friend, Daniel, has recently committed suicide, the group’s remaining members are particularly attuned to the dangers of reservation life. Above all, their adversary is the deadly phantasm of hopelessness. “We’re saving our money,” a matter-of-fact Bear reminds his comrades, “so that we can leave this place before it kills us.”
Among the achievements of FX on Hulu’s production is the accuracy with which it renders rural impoverishment. Meandering through barren cul-de-sacs, the series’s camera registers not only weed-strewn insolvency but the residents whom inertia holds in place like glue. Swooping into what passes for town, it reveals the extent to which a dearth of opportunity can slow time to a crawl. Having come to the end of their potato-chip caper, for example, the show’s protagonists have little to do besides eating their spoils and dreaming of a better life. California may be waiting over the horizon, but the tribal Oklahoma of the here and now cannot be quickly shaken off.
That so close a portrayal of boredom has its risks should be obvious to anyone who has ever pondered narrative structure for more than a few moments. Locked in a monotonous place for the sake of the show’s themes, the series’s characters cannot be easily released for the sake of its pacing. As a consequence, Reservation Dogs feels far too often like an aimless show about aimlessness. Bear and company waste their days hanging around the local medical clinic and spend an entire episode helping Elora’s Uncle Brownie dispose of a bottle of 15-year-old marijuana. Such idleness may be a flawless representation of reality, but it is not exactly the stuff of drama.
To the extent that Reservation Dogs seeks to rise above this tedium, it does so by saluting various political banners along its way. Bear’s checkup with a Korean American doctor, for instance, devolves into a buffet of microaggressions at which both characters dine. On a date with a local white man, Bear’s mother, Rita, comes to realize that her prospective beau admires Native American culture a bit too fervently. That such exchanges are occasionally funny is not to be denied, but theirs is the humor of the gender studies seminar or the critical race theory symposium. Those of us who have been taught that “fetishizing” the “other” is its own form of “violence” will greet Rita’s misadventure with a chuckle of recognition. The average viewer, however, may well see her assignation as one more scene that adds up to very little.
It would perhaps be unsound to suggest that critics have lavished praise upon Reservation Dogs precisely because they are better prepared than most to get such jokes. Indeed, the likelier case may be that FX on Hulu’s show, like Amazon’s execrable The Underground Railroad, belongs to that class of woke programming that commentators are simply not permitted to dislike. Yet even if one takes for granted the sincerity of critical approbation, its outpouring in this instance is redolent of the false belief that “representation” signals an artistic triumph rather than a merely political one. Note, for example, the New Yorker’s breathless claim that Reservation Dogs “may boast the single most exciting cast of the fall television season.” Does that plaudit refer to the quality of the acting or to the color of the actors’ skin? Is the Left even capable, at this point, of making the distinction?
A middling work that deserves neither acclaim nor any special condemnation, Reservation Dogs is worthy of a glance but is unlikely to engender any great loyalty. My own response to the series was restrained, unfussy, and quietly lethal. I was indifferent.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
