September TV Watch: Reservation Dogs, The Chair, Wellington Paranormal

As ever, there has been too much TV over the past few months, and somehow I've still attempted to watch it. If you're looking for some new shows to add to your repertoire, I can offer up a spooky Kiwi cop comedy, a dramedy about campus cancel culture, and a poignant sitcom about reservation life in Oklahoma. Yeah, variety is the spice of life.

Reservation Dogs: Created by Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi, this is a look at four Indigenous teenagers (Devery Jacobs, D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Lane Factor, and Paulina Alexis) who have grown up on a reservation in Oklahoma and harbor dreams of leaving that life behind and heading off to California. However, over the course of the first season's eight episodes, you get glimpses into what life on the reservation is really like, and the combination of resourcefulness and frustration that the inhabitants exhibit on a daily basis. There are the folks who fully embrace their Indigenous identity but then become caricatures of themselves, while there are those who are so disaffected that getting out feels like their only option. 

This is the first TV series to be shot entirely in Oklahoma, and is also the first to feature all Indigenous writers and directors as well as a predominantly Indigenous cast and crew. I can't speak for actual Indigenous folk, but I imagine having that kind of representation in front of and behind the camera is powerful and suggests the show is fairly authentic in its representations of "rez life." I recognized some of the slang from Rutherford Falls, but while that show was most often about how Indigenous people interacted with the white folk in their life, this show is almost entirely about how Indigenous people interact with each other - which feels like some sort of Indigenous Bechdel test that we need to get established in the industry. As an outsider, I enjoyed this weird, funny, and periodically very moving glimpse into a hidden world.

The tone of this show can be all over the place. It's a comedy and there were a lot of jokes that I loved (the irony of the Diabetes Awareness Frybread Feast still makes me giggle), but it also deals with the more sobering facts of reservation life and issues that plague Indigenous people across the country. The central four kids are marvels, and they have excellent chemistry with each other but also command a presence in their standalone scenes and episodes. As the show moves from looking at their little gang of "Rez Dogs" and exploring their individual trials and tribulations, it offers up both universal themes of the challenges of adolescence that we can all relate to, but then highly unique themes of what growing up on a reservation has meant to these kids. Sterlin Harjo spoke on a podcast about the jokes on this show and how he tries to poke fun at the Hollywood stereotype of Indigenous people. Well, mission accomplished. After you watch this show, you'll finally be able to relate to some three-dimensional, fully fleshed out Indigenous characters, but also enjoy some magical realism and drama thrown in for good measure. Because don't we always need a spirit guide to lead the way?

The Chair: This is another "comedy" about what happens after Professor Ji-Yoon Kim (Sandra Oh) becomes the first female (and first POC) Chair of the English department at the fictional Pembroke University. As a Korean-American woman, she feels an obligation to promote more diversity and shake things up in the decidedly white and aged faculty of her department, but of course, her reach exceeds her grasp. Over the course of six episodes, Ji-Yoon has to deal with all manner of personal and professional shenanigans--oftentimes both at once given her increasingly less platonic relationship with fellow professor Bill Dobson (Jay Duplass)--and the results can be either high farce or tragedy.

Overall, this show is a short and sweet and fun binge. It's trying to do a lot and offer up a commentary on a number of things like cancel culture, freedom of speech, Title IX, etc. Everything to do with the college and the issues being raised there feels like something out of the woke social justice warrior's playbook but the show is smart enough to understand the morass of ethical gray areas it is wandering into and not offer up any tidy or neat resolutions. Things are a bit messy, and that's as it should be. Personally, I thought there was a lot more left to explore in terms of Ji-Yoon's family life, where she has an adopted Mexican daughter that she is raising as a single mother, with the help of her elderly father who is worried because he can only speak Korean and his granddaughter won't understand him. There's such a complex story there about identities and family that could be an entire show unto itself, but there simply isn't time to explore all of that in six short episodes.

Ultimately, The Chair's brevity is both a positive and a negative. It's a quick and easy show to watch and ruminate over, but it will probably leave you with more questions than answers. As a former English minor, I did appreciate how these characters had such a love of the English language, even if they vastly differed in their pedagogy, and, no spoilers, the song that plays at the end of the final episode truly delighted me with its whimsy. This show is funny and frothy but then the tone will suddenly flip flop into being much more serious and earnest, and it's hard to ascertain what exactly the writers, Amanda Peet and Annie Julia Wyman, want to say. It shakily walks along that balance beam and it does barely manage to land the dismount, but your mileage may vary depending on what kind of mood you're in when you start watching. So give it a try and see whether The Chair becomes yet another show you cancel this season.

Wellington Paranormal: If the first two shows sounded too tonally shaky to you, never fear. Here is a show that is an emphatically silly and un-serious sitcom. Created by Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi (yes, this is quite the Waititi extravaganza today) as a spin-off of their hit film What We Do in the Shadows (which they of course subsequently spun off as its own TV series), the show aired in New Zealand for three seasons before now making its way onto American shores via the CW and HBO Max. Where I proceeded to watch it as a completely mindless and fun romp filled with monsters and Kiwi accents.

The show follows Officers O'Leary and Minogue (played by Karen O'Leary and Mike Minogue), two unassuming and slightly incompetent members of the Wellington police force who are recruited by Sergeant Maaka (Maaka Pohatu) into the department's top-secret Paranormal Unit after they have an encounter with a woman who has been possessed by a demon. Following that, each episode is another predictable riot where the two cops will show up at the scene, completely oblivious to all the weird paranormal phenomena taking place around them, until it all crescendos in such a fashion that they realize that oops, maybe they need to handcuff that werewolf or take that ghost in for questioning. 

The show will periodically offer up some jump scares, but overall, this is much more of a comedy than a horror and it is a low stakes zany way to turn off your brain and just sink back onto the couch for some light entertainment. Despite the scares, it's rather soothing because you know exactly how each episode will go and hitting the "Play Next Episode" button has never felt more automatic. So if what you really need right now is to just lay there and giggle, and not have your TV demanding too much more input from your brain, this is the show for you. I know that doesn't seem like a rave review, but seriously, given the ongoing state of the world, isn't that the kind of television we are all craving?