Hollywood’s weirdo-in-chief Taika Waititi serves up a fresh take on teens desperate to ditch their dead-end town with this strange, astounding show
No more satisfying a setting for a TV show than “scratched-out craptown peopled by criminal-leaning eccentrics”, is there? That was the exact formula for Shameless, then Shameless again, but (and this is a non-exhaustive list) it always broadly works: Brassic, My Name is Earl, Trailer Park Boys, This Country in a way, quite a lot of Ozark, when you think about it, and if you really want to lean in then all the Maeve sections of Sex Education. Essentially, whenever there are a lot of one-storey buildings or static homes, and a lot of people ambling around using a slightly alternative mode of transport (a BMX! An electric scooter!), and someone has hacked a way to steal at least one of their essential services (TV, electricity etc): there lies intrigue. There lies comedy, somehow.
To Reservation Dogs, then, the new Taika Waititi show that takes that theory and runs with it. The broad outline is this: four indigenous teenagers on a run-down reservation perform petty crimes and money-making schemes with the ultimate aim of filling a single envelope marked ‘CALIFORNIA’ with enough cash to blow this joint. This, in the wrong hands, could be quite dull – What Is the Crime This Week? I Can’t Imagine It’ll Go Smoothly. Oh Look It Didn’t. Oh Well There’s Always Next Week – but a lot of elements really come together to make this one sing.