Reservation Dogs

[Samwise]

Started watching this recently because ads for the new season (3) caught my eye. I’m partway through s2 now and damn this show is good.

It took me a bit to get into it because its pace is very relaxed.  Different plot lines kind of meander around and if you’re trying to figure out where the show is “going” you’ll get frustrated.  After a couple of episodes I said “oh, this is a Clerks kind of vibe,” and I started enjoying it a lot more.

The Spirit dude is my fave.  If I got to pick my own afterlife, wandering around eating snacks and giving sassy advice to the living sounds ideal.

[Velorath]

Yeah, it's a pretty great show. Kind of a shame they're ending after the current season, although I can see why they'd want to. Also, you can see how small the pool of Indigenous actors is, because a number of other shows that feature a significant amount Indigenous cast (like Dark Winds or Rutherford Falls) will have multiple people you recognize from Reservation Dogs.

[HaemishM]

I was hooked from the get go. I'm waiting until this season is over before diving in, because I like to binge show seasons over a week or so these days. The cast is fantastic as is the writing, and I look forward to some of these actors being in other stuff as well. I'm watching Atlanta (on season 4 now) and it has a very similar vibe/surrealistic feel at times, but with a much tighter, linear narrative than Atlanta.

[Khaldun]

I need to catch up on this.

Re: casting, I'm so glad that shows like this are casting from the communities they're about, but it does show you that at some point there's a complicated limit that has to do with how large those communities are as a proportion of the population. Even in a best-case scenario where indigenous actors are both fairly considered for race-open parts and are preferred for indigenous roles, they're just under 3% of the US population. SAG-AFTRA has about 100,000 active members, so probably at best that means about 3,000 NA members. When you sift any group of performers in SAG you probably find that about 25-30% could successfully perform in a speaking role on a regular basis (e.g., not just skill but are actually available for the length of time it takes to film an episodic series that might be filmed on location or outside of SoCal/NYC soundstages). So when you get down to about 300-500 people who could do the work, it must be pretty easy to be in a situation where you're employing a big proportion of that group of professionals, where it's not just favoritism being shown by casting directors to a handful of favorites.

[Samwise]

Damn good finale.  Struck the right balance of feeling like a good place to leave those characters without doing anything really over the top to make it feel like the end of a story.  

Really cool to have all those moments where you think "oh wow, we've been watching these kids grow up this whole time".  Bear was my least favorite character at the start of the series and I love how much he matured over the course of three seasons.