Week-to-Week: Reservation Dogs, Rutherford Falls, and Underrepresentation in the Age of Peak TV
Streaming allowed these shows to exist, and changes in streaming challenge their future
When I was in grad school, I inherited an in-class activity based on a focus group experiment in Elizabeth Bird’s The Audience In Everyday Life that focused on issues of representation in media. In the classroom, I asked students in groups to develop a TV show concept that could be any genre and any storyline, but there were stipulations on the characters that had to be a part of it: one had to be white, one had to be female, one had to be over 60, and one had to be Native American.
It was ultimately a trap to see how students imagined a show that featured a Native American character, something that they might well have had no context for as a viewer depending on what they had seen in the past. Did they use backdrops like reservations or casinos to explain the character’s presence, unable to imagine them in other settings? And did they choose to make more than one Native American character, or did they simply stick to one token form of representation.
For scheduling reasons, I haven’t run this activity since the fall of 2020, and I’ve wondered at times if I even could given that Reservation Dogs and Rutherford Falls have debuted in the intervening period. Here we have two stories about Native American communities that dig deeper and explore more dimensions of their lives than any past American television series, and so I figured that it would potentially alter this “experiment” if they didn’t have the same limited framework for Native American representation in television.
But what I’ve realized over time is that my students likely don’t know Reservation Dogs and Rutherford Falls exist. It’s possible that they’ve been fed the former by the Hulu algorithm, and perhaps they stumbled onto Rutherford Falls after checking out Bel-Air, but in this era of Peak TV the impact of any given show on people’s perception of television as a whole can easily be overestimated within critical circles. And with neither Hulu nor Peacock reporting viewing numbers, we have literally no idea what kind of reach these shows have had, and what impact their placement on year-end lists might have had in public awareness of the projects in question.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this as Reservation Dogs returns for its second season having seemingly missed its moment to solidify its place in the cultural consciousness. The FX series—that only airs on Hulu, make it make sense—was and remains a critical darling, with glowing reviews working overtime to convince viewers to give the show a chance, but it was shut out of the Emmy nominations anyway. That’s been a key theme of the reviews of season 2, with critics rallying to give the show a chance to find its audience despite missing out on what remains a critical point of inflection in the Peak TV era.
And yet while missing out on Emmy nominations may have put Reservation Dogs into a more challenging position, it’s a far better fate than Rutherford Falls, which thanks to Peacock’s peripheral place in the streaming wars has basically been scrubbed from existence following its own second season debut two months ago. Rutherford didn’t have the same outpouring of critical support that Reservation Dogs did, and with Peacock’s smaller reach it didn’t engender as much audience conversation either. Co-creator Sierra Ornelas tweeted over the weekend that the show is in its last two weeks of sampling before a decision is made, and to be frank it seems unlikely the show will be able to survive given that Peacock has already canceled their Saved By The Bell legacyquel with built-in brand recognition as they search for their original programming equilibrium.
Of course, we have long argued that achieving diverse representation should be part of that equilibrium, but the reckoning happening in streaming originals right now is emphasizing the catch-22 of Peak TV. On the one hand, the wild expansion of outlets has created more opportunities for shows like Reservation Dogs and Rutherford Falls to exist, which is obviously a net benefit. However, these streaming services began by seeing each show as part of a larger library, but the tides have shifted to placing intense expectations on every show to generate an audience and offer “value” to the service that can be more actively quantified. This means that while the huge influx of spending on original programming allowed Rutherford Falls to exist, it also means it has been put between a rock and a hard place in its attempt to stay alive, robbing fans of the chance to see the show’s stories and characters evolve. It’s the same thing that happened with Netflix’s One Day At A Time, which was canceled when Netflix revealed they would rather just create a cycle of short-run Latino-led shows so they never have to give raises.
Reservation Dogs is more likely to survive this toxic streaming environment because, at least for now, FX remains a tether to a bygone era of programming and development. It may be awkwardly folded into Hulu, but John Landgraf’s approach remains one where a show being good feels like it matters, and where the value of telling stories about underrepresented groups has weight. But there’s no equivalent at Peacock, or Netlfix, or the beleaguered HBO Max that today will be clarifying just what will be happening to its own original programming after scaling back all kids and family shows—including the lauded Latino-led Gordita Chronicles—last week before starting to write off completed projects for tax purposes in the past few days. But how much of a backstop Landgraf and FX create remains to be seen, and without any kind of viewing data we have no idea what reach Reservation Dogs’ second season will have, or what the future holds for the representational breakthrough of this moment in streaming TV.
Episodic Observations
I thought the two-part Reservation Dogs premiere was effective. I expected they would use the broken down car to push Elora and Jackie back to the rest of the show immediately, but having their misadventure extend a bit allowed them to introduce a fun Megan Mullally guest spot and fleshed out Jackie’s character a bit more. Everything else was very much the show emphasizing the charm of its tragedy-tinged world, with Bear and Willie Jack kind of reevaluating themselves in the midst of Elora’s departure. Excited to see the season unfold, especially since critics have suggested the third and fourth episodes are even stronger.
I binged through Netflix’s Uncoupled swiftly over the course of the week, as it’s a breezy watch—eight half-hour episodes, with exactly the kind of Sex and the City-like storytelling you’d imagine from Darren Star. I don’t know that it has anything profoundly new to say, and it struggles at times to service its supporting characters who feel undercooked compared to Neil Patrick Harris’ Michael, but it’s charming enough and I’d gladly watch more.
I’ll have more to say about the HBO Max situation unfolding when the dust settles, but the idea that shows that are getting made could start disappearing as tax writeoffs is a new wrinkle in our current climate—I do think things will be different in TV where the writeoffs would be much smaller than Batgirl and the Scoob sequel’s big price tags, but it’s still got me plenty concerned.
I really enjoyed the RESERVATION DOGS first two eps of this season, especially the second one. The scene at the river with the prayer and the singing was absolutely wonderful, and the sense of danger for the two runaways was very real.
I get ads for RESERVATION DOGS all the time as I wander around the web. In one notable example, I was on a native news site reading a story and the only interstitial ad in the story, like 6 times, was RESERVATION DOGS.
It does seem unlikely we'll get a third season of RUTHERFORD FALLS and that's a shame. There's some wonderful characters and actors there, and I always enjoy my visit. Makes me mad that nobody knows Peacock shows exist. Girls5eva, people!
This reminds me I need to watch Rutherford Falls. I will be watching Reservation Dogs weekly. So I will only have the Catholic guilt for the former if it gets axed.