Reservation Dogs

Amid and around these quietly shattering emotional beats, Reservoir Dogs is hilarious. ... This is one that richly deserves your attention, and which you should not snub.

Season 2 of Reservation Dogs offers up a vision all its own that feels more unclassifiable. What makes this all work is how the rich characters are interwoven into everything, drawing us deeper into what is both a gorgeous and tragic tapestry of their lives that are still unfolding before us.

It’s every bit as good as the first [season], maybe better — meaning that there’s plenty of time for Emmy voters and audiences to catch up with what may currently be the best show on TV.

Both in its tenor and subject matter, the comedy deserves to be understood in its own terms. Luckily, as its second season makes clear, Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi’s award-winning FX show continues to blaze a path for itself.

It took no time at all to understand Bear (D’Pharoah Woon-A-Tai), Elora (Devery Jacobs), Cheese (Lane Factor) and Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis), nor to slip into the show’s world where the banal could meet the surreal at any given moment. The same holds true in Season. ... This is a show so self-assured in its own voice and perspective that it’s not just gratifying to watch, but a welcome relief.

Just a season and a half in, Harjo and co-creator Taika Waititi have already found their groove with Reservation Dogs. Inviting us onto the reservation to experience it with this group of quickly beloved kids, Reservation Dogs feels like a celebration of Native life and a way to inspire change for the better.

A show everyone should see and most will love. I do have two minor concerns. First, the ensemble actually might be too big for a half-hour show with a 10-episode season. ... Second, Dogs has a tendency to cycle back through the same couple of core pilot concepts.

Sometimes the show can feel like it’s pushing the emotional beats a bit harder this season than when it allows them to come organically through the plotting; however, every episode finds a way to sneak up on you, realizing that things like grief and loneliness don’t pop up in sitcom structures as much as they work their way through daily life.

Season 2 of Reservation Dogs may very well be the best thing with Waititi’s name on it this year, as every scene is teeming with absurdist comedy, poignant moments of loss, and perfect needle drops.

Once again, Reservation Dogs excels at interweaving and juxtaposing the humorous and the sincere, the sarcastic and the spiritual. ... Some performers, like Farmer, have more to do this season; others, like Lane Factor, who plays the group’s fourth surviving member, Cheese, get a little lost in the half-hour episodes.

Reservation Dogs improves on its excellent first season by deepening the community on the rez, making it less about the Dogs and more about traditions, people who think they know the traditions but don’t, and just how funny and rich life there can be, even if people have to be creative to get by.

While the choice to separate the gang futzes with the show's sense of momentum—Lane Farmer’s Cheese is sorely underrepresented in the front half of this season—it makes room for deeper, more personal character stories in each episode. It’s a dramatic shift from the ensemble antics that made “Reservation Dogs” such a standout in its freshman year, and it's proof that the show, like its central characters, is still growing and changing.

The terrific first season focused on the urge to get away; the second, which returns to Hulu on Wednesday, is about what it takes to rediscover your home. ... The new season leans a few notches closer to the drama side of dramedy, but there’s still plenty of laid-back humor.

For all of the mourning this season, it also carries an assurance as the creative team and actors inhabit their roles and the world they’ve created. The humor may take a backseat, but it’s in service of more complex storytelling. The Reservation Dogs may not know who they are yet, but this show certainly does.