Reservation Dogs has always been a tough show to describe. I know this because I have tried, many times, once as recently as yesterday when I was explaining how excited and sad I was to be watching the season three finale this week, which also served as the show’s series finale. Someone said “Oh, what’s it about?” and I bumbled through an answer that went something like this…
“Okay, it’s this show about indigenous teenagers growing up on a reservation in Oklahoma. And it’s… it’s like a coming-of-age thing, but also they steal stuff a lot and cope with death and sometimes spirits show up to cuss at them. It’s weird. But, like… good weird. Sometimes it’s extremely funny in the stupidest way you can think of. Sometimes it’ll be so real and heartfelt that it’ll open you up and yank your heart out. Sometimes a school bus explodes or Ethan Hawke shows up. It’s so good. It’s… it’s just so good. You gotta watch it. It’s good. Trust me.”
Which, I mean, sure. All of that is true. It was all of those things, especially in the third and final season, which I will gladly put up against the final run of episodes of any other show made in the entire history of television. Everything I mentioned in that rambling description happened in there at some point. We had spirits showing up to talk to characters, some dressed as ancient warriors who cuss and talk like your average aging millennial, some named Deer Lady who have hooves for feet and murder people who — as we had just learned through a series of deeply upsetting flashbacks — were responsible for a lot of very real historical abuse the indigenous community faced over the years. A school bus did explode. Ethan Hawke did show up as a stoner house painter and deadbeat father. One guy did acid and saw aliens and it ended up tying the whole season together in a way I never saw coming. It was a wild run, man.
But even while that is true, it doesn’t capture what made the show so great. Even with the aliens and explosions and conversations with spirits, the show was also just extremely real. Very few entire shows can run you through the series of emotions Reservation Dogs ran you through in a single 27-minute episode. There was one this season where this happened…
… and then, maybe 10 minutes later, the same group of guys was sitting around a campfire crying about a close friend they had lost touch with. And I was crying, too. The episode ended and it took all I had not to send texts to all of my friends that just said, “Dude I love you” out of nowhere at like 11 p.m. Maybe I should have. Maybe I should do it now. Maybe you should, too.
I guess my point here is that Reservation Dogs was a really special show, both on the micro level — crying, emotions, etc. — and the macro level. It was a show that dropped a majority of viewers into a world they might not have been familiar with — life on a reservation, indigenous culture in general — and then went on to prove that there are things that everyone can relate to despite our different backgrounds. A big theme of the show was death. The main teenage characters lost a friend right from the jump and had to learn how to deal with it. The adults had to deal with getting older and saying goodbye. The elders had to deal with staring their own mortality in the face. And again, there were a slew of very silly jokes sprinkled throughout. Please remember this was a comedy first, even if things did get pretty real at times.
The show’s creator, Sterlin Harjo, explained this all very well in a postmortem with Rolling Stone’s Alan Sepinwall that dropped after the finale.
Season One, the kids lost their friend, and they are mourning that death and trying to get better. And then, by the time we get to Season Three, it’s like they get to take their lessons that they learned in Season One and Two, and they get to apply them in a real way to their community. And also reach out, and help their elders with what they’ve learned. There’s no way in my culture to represent that than how people come together [when someone dies].
This is true. Death is one of those things that is both universal and deeply personal. I will be thinking about this line for a long, long time, from a scene in the final season where the adults give one last sendoff to a friend they lost years ago. It represents everything I could ever want anyone to say about me when it’s my time to go.
See what I mean? It’s not easy to deal with this kind of heavy stuff while also staying committed to being extremely silly whenever possible. I can’t stress this last part strongly enough. One of the characters spent half an episode scrubbing a wall to clean off a graffiti drawing — that she made — of an ejaculating penis that had both a face and large breasts. This show contained multitudes.
I feel like I’m not doing it justice here. I feel like I’m not hitting the nail on the head squarely. I think I’m doing better than I did in the explanation I tried giving my friend yesterday, but still. It’s hard. It’s hard to put into words what this show did on an episode-to-episode basis, the way it made the world smaller and larger at the same time, the way it showed how “coming-of-age” doesn’t stop when you turn 18, how adults don’t always have the answers, how it’s important to keep looking for them, and how sometimes you need to learn to be okay with — to paraphrase another special show that blended the silliest possible jokes with profound stories about death and loss — letting the mystery be.
I’m going to miss it a lot. But I’m also glad it ended the way it did. It was about as close to a perfect three-season run of television as I’ve ever seen. Part of me hopes I forget enough of it over time that I can dive back in from the beginning and revisit it with relatively fresh eyes. Part of me hopes that some of the show stays with me forever. Most of me hopes that what I’ve written here did justice to just how great this show really was, both for people who watched it and felt the same and for people who were on the fence about checking it out and needed a little shove.
I’ll give the final word here to the show itself, via another set of screencaps.
Reservation Dogs was just a really, really special television show.
