Dark Winds

Dark Winds’ season premiere perfectly lays the groundwork for the remaining seven outings and features great performances from McClarnon, Gordon, Matten, and Deanna Allison.

Old school sleuthing and shootouts to character development and ambitious visuals (especially in upcoming episodes), Season Three of Dark Winds thrillingly defies expectations.

McClarnon’s magnetism has always made it difficult to look away whenever he’s onscreen, but in these eight episodes, he reveals fissures in that presence, imbuing Leaphorn with an uncertainty that makes the character feel more mortal and elevates Dark Winds’ strongest season to date.

The acting, led by the incomparable McClarnon, is unparalleled, the action is thrilling, its cinematography captures both the beauty and the bleakness of the Southwest, and time and time again it proves that the monsters that haunt us the most are often unseen. We do have one nitpick: There are cameos by two of the show’s more famous executive producers in episode one that are as distracting as Ed Sheeran’s turn in Game of Thrones.

There are grittier, hipper, more popular crime dramas coursing through the TV/streaming ecosystem – “Tulsa King,” “Presumed Innocent,” “The Rookie” — but none of those shows can match the quality of AMC’s “Dark Winds.” .... “Dark Winds” continues to feel taut and rightsized.

The show is clearly well-crafted by showrunner John Wirth and the rest of the writers, who have well-succeeded in their construction of a mystery series that continuously lives up to the hype.

Season 3 maintains the same high standards from before and presents a twisty mystery and goes to darker moral places. It’s creepier too.

Chee gets a bit lost in the narrative as he travels back and forth between the two areas as a unifying element. Still, McClarnon is such an arresting screen presence, and even more so in this extra-vulnerable mode, that any structural fuzziness doesn’t much matter. [Mar 2025, p.77]

While we’re not in love with the separate storylines for the show’s main characters, season 3 of Dark Winds continues to combine Native mysticism with whodunits rooted in the real world, all anchored by the reassuring presence of McClarnon.