It’s safe to say that as a national or even global community we have spent the past two years teaching ourselves new ways to navigate pain, loss, and cruelty. While many have found comfort in the kind of TV that chases superhuman levels of kindness, that’s not a balm that will heal every wound. FX’s freshman comedy series Reservation Dogs, which wraps up an incredible slow burn of a first season this week, offers something darker and saltier but no less instructive on how to survive the unsurvivable. This, series creator Sterlin Harjo says, is because the Native community has long learned to thrive on a distinct cocktail of humor and sorrow—not laughing despite the pain, but through it. 

Reservation Dogs centers on four young friends—Elora Danan (Devery Jacobs), Bear (D’Pharoah Woon-A-Tai), Cheese (Lane Factor), and Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis)—pulling off small crimes and misdemeanors in the hopes of saving up and escaping their Oklahoma Reservation for the promise of a new life in California. Their manifest destiny to go west is inspired by the loss of one of their crew, Daniel (Dalton Cramer), whose death the previous year casts a long shadow over the show. But what begins as an amiable, shaggy day-in-the-life comedy about a specific community many in America are woefully unexposed to, blooms into a profound exploration of grief and moving on. 

Comedy fans will recognize Reservation Dogs’ credited co-creator Taika Waititi who has done plenty of compelling work rooted in the distinctive comedy stylings of the indigenous Māori communities of New Zealand. But this show is obviously incredibly personal to native Oklahoman Sterlin Harjo who explains that this kind of unhurried marination in a joke or premise is precisely the brand of comedy he grew up with. 

“I think that Native comedy is a sophisticated comedy,” he says. “It’s not punchline, it’s about the silences and then it’s about teasing. It has a slower rhythm to it. The laughter is in the silences between jokes.” 

At eight half-hour episodes, Reservation Dogs’ first season is hardly a long commitment and perhaps watching it in a binge on FX on Hulu—which many of its audience will likely do in the coming weeks as the buzz around the show continues to escalate—will erase the delayed gratification of the week-to-week discovery of the house of cards Harjo built. A show that starts with Tarantino references and jokes about how a character is named after the baby in the movie Willow ends with devastation and broken friendships. But never stops laughing. 

No matter the pace at which audiences choose to digest Harjo’s story, that distinct blend of hurt and hilarity will come through. “We laugh in the face of darkness,” Harjo says. “Our humor butts up against tragedy a lot of times. I think that’s something that’s been true through our history and our survival. We always had to keep our humor intact to survive.” There’s an instructive element there, of course, for how we all might better survive these “interesting times.” There’s also something damning that mingles with our recent reflection on America’s original sins. 

Harjo and his young cast weren’t kidding when they took the Emmys stage Sunday night and remarked on the overdue rise in indigenous stories told by indigenous people. Reservation Dogs joined Peacock’s Rutherford Falls in bringing a record number of Native storytellers in front of the camera and into TV writers rooms this past year. Tommy Orange’s There There took the literary world by storm in 2019, the Obamas optioned Angeline Boulley’s gripping YA debut Firekeeper’s Daughter for Netflix, and Marvel Studios is centering a buzzy new TV show, Echo, around a Native American superhero played by newcomer Alaqua Cox who’s headed straight from living on a Wisconsin Reservation to Disney+ stardom. 

The rise of “Native TikTok” in particular has offered a rich vein of both Native comedy and Native political content for fans of the highly-addictive app. Reservation Dogs cast member Dallas Goldtooth who plays the comically inept warrior “Spirit” is a particularly viral hit.  Though Harjo himself is not a TikTok user, he’s unsurprised to find Native voices taking root in that space: “The internet was the great equalizer. You could be from a Reservation in a rural community and connect with the world. That’s how I really started the comedy thing myself with my group The 1491s. We didn’t have anywhere to go because Hollywood was not banging down anyone’s door to do Native comedy and so we would just put it online for free on YouTube.” 

Whether this recent rise in Native storytelling is part of the internet-inspired content boom and rise in Own Voices, a cyclical echo of the heydays of Sherman Alexie and Louise Erdrich, or a direct response to the national attention brought by the Standing Rock protests, it’s long past overdue. One of the pleasures of Reservation Dogs is watching familiar Native actors, often relegated to a certain type of role written by white creators, stretch their wings in the loose comedy space Harjo has created. Watching actors like Zahn McClarnon or Gary Farmer get loose is joy enough, but a mid-season episode featuring a downright goofy Wes Studi—who spent the ’90s playing every stoic “leathers and feathers” character available—is one of the show’s greatest gifts. 

“I did not write that role for him in mind, that character was a lot younger,” Harjo says of giving the part of a low-level criminal and slacker to the 73 year-old Studi. “But once I started making that character older, I couldn’t quit thinking about Wes. That leads to some of the comedy—the way he talks and says ‘playboy.’  It’s funny hearing it come from Wes and I can’t wait to expand that character.”

Harjo will have a chance to write more material for Wes Studi because Reservation Dogs has already been picked up for a second season. By then, the cat will be out of the bag that the show is serving up both comedy and poignant drama expertly mingled, especially in the back half where ensemble laughs give way to two-hander episodes concentrating on each of the four kids learning something from an elder. Even though revelations about Daniel unfold over the course of the first season, they do so organically as his four friends dig deeper into their own grief and not as part of some kind of whodunnit gimmick designed to hook viewers. 

“I didn’t want it to feel like whiplash or episodic,” Harjo says of his decision to slowly turn up the gas on the melancholy. “Now here’s the funny part, now here’s the sad part. I just wanted them to be intertwined. You have this undercurrent of a loss that’s also there. I wanted to show respect to that and know that we deal with these things in our communities and also how you don’t expect things to happen. I wanted it to feel real and how it really does when you lose someone—how you’re always reflecting on things that you missed—but I want it to slowly happen. So you really feel it and that it’s not for shock value. It’s not for anything cheap. It is for the story and it’s to give honor to people that we’ve lost like that.”

Given how deeply the concept of loss has infiltrated every aspect of our lives, we can all use a survival guide like Reservation Dogs. 

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