A famous Kiwi director lends his support to a new comedy about four Native American teens looking to escape rural Oklahoma.
Taika Waititi’s name is on Reservation Dogs as co-creator and executive producer, and he co-wrote the fi rst episode. So, it’s unsurprising that, despite the comedy series being about four Native American teens living on a reservation in contemporary Oklahoma, Waititi’s sensibilities are detectable.
Moments in it remind you of his Boy, especially in the way Bear, the supposed leader of the quartet, hopes he’ll connect with his hopeless absent father. There’s also a scene in the second episode where reservation cop “Big” is warning Bear off soft -drinks because sugar is “white man’s bullets”. Big prefers energy drinks because “it’s natural, made out of energy”. Behind them, a drinks machine glows its limegreen brand name “Skux”.
But other than such in-jokes, Waititi’s main influence on Reservation Dogs was having the profi le to get the show made. Aft er pitching the idea, he got a “yes” a week later from Disney subsidiary FX, which was behind the US spin-off of What We Do in the Shadows. Creatively, he has deferred to his co-executive producer, Sterlin Harjo, who has directed and written most of the fi rst season. “It’s not my place to make this show. I really believe people need to tell their own stories … from whatever area they are from,” Waititi said when it was launched in the US last month.
“It just wouldn’t have been appropriate if I had come in and gone, ‘Let’s Taika-fy this show.’ It’s stealing the story.” His job, he said, was to “push this thing out into the water, and Sterlin was the one who paddled the boat and made sure there weren’t any holes in the bottom of it”.
The idea sprang from Waititi and Harjo’s friendship. They hit it off at Sundance film festivals, which screened their early features in the late noughties: Waititi’s Eagle Vs Shark and Boy; Harjo’s Four Sheets to the Wind and Barking Water. “There are a lot of diff erences between New Zealand and rural Oklahoma, but a lot of similarities as well,” Harjo told National Public Radio. “Over the years, I’d tell Taika stories from home and he’d tell me stories from home. It became clear that all the stories we told were always funny. And when native people are represented in Hollywood, you never get to see that humour. It’s always so earnest and so sad or depressing. “Let’s make a comedy that’s really refl ective of our communities. They’re hilarious. And we’re survivors. And a lot of the reasons we survived is because of our humour.”
We meet the quartet of Bear (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), Elora Danan (Devery Jacobs), Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis) and Cheese (Lane Factor) as they steal a snackfoods delivery truck and fl og it off to the meth-heads at the local wrecker’s yard. The four want out of their dead-end town and are raising money so they can go to California. They blame the place for the death of Daniel, the fi ft h member of their group. They also have to deal with a new teen gang encroaching on their territory. Every time he gets beat up, Bear encounters a ghostly ancestor who, when it comes to ancient wisdom, isn’t the sharpest of tomahawks. “The spirit world is cold. My nipples are always hard.”
He may have been a simple warrior in his day, but here, he has been promoted to chief running gag. He’s not the only amusing supporting turn, but the show’s immense appeal and originality lie not in its irreverent silliness, but in tagging along as the four “Rez Dogs” try to slip the leash of Harjo’s town.
Reservation Dogs is on Disney+ from September 17.