Sterlin Harjo makes comedies that keep going after the joke has landed, until grief or something stranger walks in. His Oklahoma is small, hot and unrepainted, and Reservation Dogs is the best case yet that he knows exactly what to do with it.
Fi1m perspective
A scene in Reservation Dogs (2021) sets up a joke, lands it, and then does not cut away. Somebody stays in the frame a beat too long, and the thing the joke was covering for, a dead friend, an absent parent, a town nobody quite left, arrives on its own. Harjo writes and directs the series, which he created with Taika Waititi, and this refusal to cut away when a scene turns uncomfortable is the most recognisable thing he does. It is why a comedy about four teenagers stealing a lorry full of crisps is one of the best-made programmes we have seen in years.
He had been working the same ground for a long while before anyone much noticed. His first feature, Four Sheets to the Wind (2007), follows a young Seminole man through loss and change in Oklahoma; Barking Water (2009) is a road trip about family and dying; Mekko (2015) is a thriller set in Tulsa. We have not reviewed them and will not judge them here, but the subjects line up: grief, home, people who stayed. Reservation Dogs ran three seasons, from 2021 to 2023, with an all-Indigenous writers' room, directors and cast, and Harjo ended it on his own terms. "I couldn't imagine dragging it out," he said. Since then he has written Rez Ball (2024) and created The Lowdown (2025), a Tulsa noir with Ethan Hawke.
What works is the weight. Waititi had made Boy before this, about a child in a small Maori town, and brought the same instinct for children who talk like adults and adults who behave like children. Harjo supplied the town. Christian Sprenger and Mark Schwartzbard shoot it in hard, hot daylight, four kids small in the corner of wide, empty roads. Rich Toyon and Brandon Tonner-Connolly build a convenience store, a clinic and a community hall that look forty years overdue for paint. Mato Wayuhi's score moves between hip-hop and something nearer country and is held back until it is needed. The writers' room, with Bobby Wilson, Ryan RedCorn and Dallas Goldtooth among them, gives every scene that shape: joke, then the sadder thing. We laughed, and then in the first season we found ourselves grieving Daniel, a boy who is dead before the opening episode and whom we never properly meet, because every scene is arranged around the space he left.
Not all of it holds. The detours into the spirit world are presented as ordinary parts of community life, which is the right idea, but they do not always land, and the later seasons scatter the gang in ways that cost the series some of its pull. Those are the flaws of someone trying things rather than someone coasting, and we would still recommend the programme to almost anyone.
The question now is whether the patience travels. A noir has to move. Harjo's best scenes work because they do not, and The Lowdown will tell us which habit wins.
Biography
Sterlin Harjo is an American director, writer and producer. Born on 14 November 1979 in Holdenville, Oklahoma, he is a citizen of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma and has Muscogee heritage. He studied art and film at the University of Oklahoma.
Harjo received a Sundance Institute fellowship in 2004. His short film Goodnight, Irene premiered at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. His feature films include Four Sheets to the Wind (2007), which premiered at Sundance and won him best director at the American Indian Film Festival, and Barking Water (2009). He has also directed the documentaries This May Be the Last Time (2014) and Love and Fury (2020).
Harjo co-created the FX series Reservation Dogs (2021–2023) with Taika Waititi, serving as writer, director and showrunner; the series featured an all-Indigenous writers’ room, directors and series regulars. He later directed and wrote episodes of The Lowdown (2025). In 2024 he was named a MacArthur Fellow.
