Reservation Dogs Closes the Circle of Peak TV

Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photo Courtesy FX

This article was published on September 28, 2023. Reservation Dogs has since received four nominations for the 2024 Emmy Awards. Read all of Vulture’s Emmy-race coverage here.

In the first minutes of Reservation Dogs, teenagers Bear, Elora, Willie Jack, and Cheese steal a Flaming Flamers truck, hoping to sell it for enough money to leave Okern, Oklahoma. Their friend Daniel died by suicide the year before, and the only way they can imagine living is by leaving the place they think killed him. The episode begins with a few establishing shots of town; one is an overhead drone shot of a cul-de-sac next to a long straight road extending off into the horizon. It’s how the Rez Dogs picture their options: Either they head off into the unseen distance, or they’re trapped forever in this insular, unchanging, futureless circle.

The show’s earliest episodes make it hard to see that choice as a lie. A worse show, one less deft and less comfortable with itself, would’ve tried to tip its hand from the beginning. These kids can’t see things clearly yet! They don’t understand what’s right in front of them! It’s very simple to fall into the same trap the kids have fallen into, the trap Reservation Dogs would spend the next three seasons gradually dismantling. Its desaturated grays and sense of hopelessness appear objective, but they’re actually rooted in the teenage perspective. “As a young person, of course you’d want to run far away,” I wrote then about the show’s first four episodes.

With the series finale three years later, Reservation Dogs comes back to those opening images. The finale begins with overhead shots of Okern, the same radio DJ greeting his audience, a slowly turning drone shot of a cul-de-sac. But the meaning has shifted. The Rez Dogs have left and come home again, separated and come back together, been forced to reconsider what they want. In each episode the show looped and re-looped through the same ideas, played out across an ever-deeper field of characters and circumstances. What does growth look like? Is it the same as progress? Progress for who, and to what end? How do you heal? How do you keep going? Every time Reservation Dogs turns back through that loop, it enacts its answer to the Rez Dogs’ frustration. Closing the circle is one way to move forward. By the time the series reaches its finale, Cheese says that he can’t wait to be an elder. Willie Jack, future medicine woman, joins the aunties in bringing food to those who need help. Bear realizes the community needs many warriors more than it needs one great leader. Elora decides to leave for college, but only while assuring her friends that she’ll be back, that she’s not abandoning them. For a finale episode about a funeral, it’s impossibly hopeful. The cul-de-sac isn’t a trap. Okern looks warmer in the last episode, the yellows are softer. Over the radio, the DJ plays “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.”

Reservation Dogs belongs in the pantheon of great television, TV that comes with an aura of unmistakable magic. The series was made by a relative newcomer, led by four young actors with little to no previous experience, and directed and written by many people who’d never been offered a seat in the room, less one at the table. It has an immediately distinctive sense of humor, full of jokes that slide sideways or wait patiently for the right moments to leap. It could move from episodes like “Decolonativization,” full of exasperated eye-rolling at the corporate-seminar version of Native culture; straight into “Stay Gold, Cheesy Boy,” a legitimately frightening episode where the youngest Rez Dog gets trapped inside bureaucratic cruelty; then to a drug trip-turned-conspiracy thriller; and then a spare, gut-punching story about reconnecting with a relative. Reservation Dogs holds all these tones and ideas together with such effortless, unshakable confidence, it’s easy to overlook the challenge of containing that many moods and colors at once.

Showrunner Sterlin Harjo has not received the auteur treatment that follows the cohort of white-guy writers who create shows with distinctive vision and astounding scale. But at every turn, Reservation Dogs earns that kind of grandiose language. It’s hard not to wonder what kinds of descriptions would be lobbed Harjo’s way if Reservation Dogs had been more like an hourlong drama about male ennui. But that too feels part of its legacy; it’s not modeled on the broad-shouldered dramas of the prestige era. It’s not about a sad midlife crisis and it has very little sex or violence. It is unique in part because until very recently, there’s been so little television led by Native American creative perspectives — Reservation Dogs, Peacock’s Rutherford Falls, and AMC’s Dark Winds have constituted a brief but potent foothold for Native storytelling on TV. Reservation Dogs is singular because it’s just that good.

Singular works of art come from somewhere, though, and the fact that Reservation Dogs exists is the result of two distinct trends in TV over the past decade. It comes out of a small but powerful arm of the prestige TV ecosystem, the prestige post-comedy, which grew from the legacies of Girls, Louis, and Transparent, then proliferated into a fascinating cloud of series: Master of None, BoJack Horseman, Better Things, Fleabag, Atlanta, Russian Doll, Barry, Somebody Somewhere, Beef, The Bear. These are the prestige drama’s more original, lower-budget sisters, freed from the pressure of franchises, adaptations, and marquee-drama expectations and allowed to be their intimate, experimental selves.

At the same time, the last several years were the era of Peak TV. The desperation to feed a perpetual growth chart forced executives to make as much TV as they possibly could, which meant huge names and big-budget monsters but also smaller shows made by people who weren’t from all the same alumni pools. At a time when studios were actually interested in making a show by someone like Sterlin Harjo (as long as he was backed by a bigger name, in this case Taika Waititi), there was an established model for smaller series that lived and thrived in the brackish tonal spaces between broad comedy and muscular drama. Without both of these forces operating at once, it’s tough to imagine a show like Reservation Dogs getting made.

But both of these forces are much weaker than they were five years ago. Peak TV’s end is inarguable. Even if the strikes had not happened this summer, television was already moving into an era of contraction. The strikes have given studios even more cover to pare down their slates, shifting all the money onto dully familiar franchise titles and showrunners with proven records. The big announcements are not about exciting new talent and original storytelling; they’re about Harry Potter and another Game of Thrones spinoff. The half-hour post-comedy has a few big titles this year to recommend its continuing power, especially Beef and The Bear, but that particular form has become television’s go-to space for original storytelling. Even tiny budgets may not save many of these kinds of in-development shows from the post-Peak reaping.

There’s an accompanying fear: that the end of Reservation Dogs will also be the end of this small moment for Native storytelling on TV, and for the window where a boom all over the industry made space for a group of small, astounding shows. The Rez Dogs have embraced their futures, but there’s no similar certainty for what will come after Reservation Dogs, not at a time of strikes and mergers and safe IP pitches. In the best case for TV, Harjo and other creatives from Reservation Dogs become established voices, building the series’ legacy into a flood of new stories. The other possibility is that Hollywood shuts the door on shows like this. That would be a terrible waste of talent and promise. In the final moments of “Dig,” the four elders sit at a picnic table and make a toast. “Well, we did good,” Bucky says. “To the next one,” Brownie replies. We can only hope there will be dozens of next ones.