From left, Paulina Alexis, Devery Jacobs, D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Lane Factor and Elva Guerra in a scene from Reservation Dogs.The Associated Press
The Emmys finally caught up to Reservation Dogs. Now it’s Canada’s turn.
I’m not just talking about homegrown audiences who have thus far held out on the rascally Indigenous-led coming-of-age series about teens growing up in Oklahoma’s Muscogee Creek Nation, but also a TV ecosystem in Canada that prohibits our own storytellers from making something so joyously weird and defiantly singular.
Reservation Dogs – which just scored a better-late-than-never (and not enough but we’ll take it) nomination in the Emmys’ outstanding comedy series category – has been the best series on television alongside Succession; at least according to me, Time magazine and The Hollywood Reporter. Yes, we’ll take the Rez Dogs subplots about peddling stolen chips, meat pies and greasy frybread over The Bear’s shrieky, Emmy-dominating, haute-cuisine-with-a-heavy-serving-of-trauma shenanigans any day. And, we won’t even get into why a comedy like Reservation Dogs has to compete against something as dramatic as The Bear.
Reservation Dogs grapples with trauma too. The series stars D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai (who is also nominated in the lead actor category), Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs, Paulina Alexis and Lane Factor as the scrappy, titular gang who are hurting from the loss of their friend to suicide. They make plans to honour his memory by escaping to California.
But as the series, created by Sterlin Harjo, progresses across three seasons, they look to their community for comfort and healing. And in this case, community doesn’t just include aunties and elders, but also stoner spirit guides and a vengeful Deer Lady. All share the giddy vibes in a show that blurs the lines between comedy and drama as it does – in accordance with Indigenous belief – the material and spirit world.
Reservation Dogs has carved out its own space in television, with a misfit brand of humour and warmth that emanates from the very community it’s depicting, and the Indigenous collaborators in front and behind the camera.
Many of that talent actually hail from Canada, including Woon-A-Tai, Jacobs and Alexis along with supporting cast members Sarah, Tamara and Jennifer Podemski and director Danis Goulet. They shine in the kind of series that our homegrown television model is just too precious to make.
“What made that show so special is how it embraces the specificity of the community and nuances of our cultural humour,” says Goulet, on the phone with The Globe and Mail from her family’s home in Saskatchewan. “I think it remains to be seen whether or not our broadcasting environment up here will support that kind of freedom and experimentation.”
Goulet, the Cree/Métis director of the dystopian thriller Night Raiders, is behind some of the most beautiful and moving episodes on Reservation Dogs. That includes Season 2’s Mabel, written by Jacobs, which is about the latter’s character Elora Danan bracing for her grandmother’s passing. In that episode, the community gathers at the grandmother’s home for a commemoration that is both comforting and reconciliatory, treating death, in accordance with the culture, as a beautiful passage instead of a sorrowful moment. Even the funerals in Reservation Dogs leave plenty of room for humour.
It’s not like Canada hasn’t attempted Indigenous comedy before. Homegrown fare such as The Rez and Mohawk Girls predate Reservation Dogs. Anishinaabe stand-up comic Paul Rabliauskas’s sitcom Acting Good was a recent worthwhile foray into this terrain. And there’s hope that the coming arctic series North of North as well as a show based on rap duo Snotty Nose Rez Kids can fill the current void.
We should celebrate these opportunities for Indigenous artists at home. But we also have to recognize what continues to inhibit Canadian television: the impulse to appease wide audiences from coast to coast, making sure everything is easily digestible to the point of being basic. You know what that looks like, whether in comedy or drama – the tendency to shave the edges off, even in our most celebrated shows such as The Porter, Sort Of and Little Bird.
Canadian TV tends to water down the very specificity that made Reservation Dogs so special, and instead leans toward a Canadian comedy template that can feel hokey. The micromanaging gatekeepers at the three major broadcasters – who are trying to make content that appeals to the whole nation – tend to lean broad, bordering on cringe.
A broadcaster like FX, the studio behind Reservation Dogs, isn’t so burdened to make generic content, since they are just one among so many networks in the U.S. They enjoy the freedom to make shows for a niche audience that have the potential to breakout. FX is also the studio behind The Bear and Under the Bridge. The latter is an Emmy-nominated true-crime series starring Lily Gladstone that grapples with the murder of 14-year-old B.C. teen Reena Virk; a very tough chapter in Canadian history, left to be told in an American series.
Goulet, who is currently working on a new project with Harjo at FX, describes positive experiences so far with executives at the channel, where the Indigenous creators are empowered to represent their community in playful and at times daring ways. “They really respect what you’re bringing,” she says. And the results are obvious.
What would it take for Canada to tell stories like that?
We can hold out hope that things will improve with recent investment in Indigenous storytelling. The $65-million budget from Canadian Heritage (committed over the next five years) to the Indigenous Screen Office is heartening, as is the 0.5-per-cent allocation from the CRTC as part of the Online Streaming Act. While that funding is earmarked for Indigenous-led projects where two of the three key creatives (director, screenwriter, showrunner, producer) are Indigenous, it’s the kind of influx that could attract producing partners who tend to tokenize while pandering to that broad appeal.
“We’ve all had negative experiences in the past with partners in the industry who claim to share our values but don’t really want to cede power to Indigenous creatives,” says Goulet. “So, it’s a critical time to reassert that the ISO’s mandate is narrative sovereignty. And that means being willing to defer to the creative visions of Indigenous people and to empower them in leadership positions.
“When it comes to questions of that specificity, we should have the final say, full stop.”