As ‘Reservation Dogs’ and ‘Dark Winds’ Return With New Seasons, Is Native Storytelling Finally Here to Stay?
variety.comMichael Schneider Variety Editor at Large Perhaps it’s coincidence, or serendipity, but two of the best-reviewed shows on television happened to both return at the same time with new seasons last week — and both put Native storytelling and Indigenous characters front and center.
FX’s “Reservation Dogs” and AMC’s “Dark Winds” have a few things in common — starting, of course, with Zahn McClarnon, who stars as Navajo tribal police officer Joe Leaphorn in “Dark Winds” and recurs as Officer Big in “Reservation Dogs.” And both also share acclaim from viewers and critics: “Reservation Dogs” sports a 99% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes’ reviews aggregator, while “Dark Winds” boasts a remarkable 100% ranking.
But the two shows come from very different genres: “Reservation Dogs” is a modern-day coming of age dramatic comedy about a group of friends working through the death of one of their own, while “Dark Winds” is a western noir period piece set in the 1970s. “There’s just more space for a lot of different voices, with television being the kind of Zeitgeist of creativity now,” says “Dark Winds” executive producer/director Chris Eyre, who first broke through with the film “Smoke Signals” in 1998.
Of course, Eyre notes that he’s been waiting for this moment for 25 years. “We all thought that the door was going to open up wide after ‘Smoke Signals.’ It’s taken this long, but it’s just amazing that it’s here now.
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