A review of this week's The Lowdown, "Old Indian Trick" — with spoilers — coming up just as soon as I take you to the stank hole...
Alan Sepinwall
Whenever a filmmaker or showrunner isn't a straight white guy, there's an institutional assumption that they'll stay in their own demographic lanes, and tell stories reflecting their individual experience. Some have succeeded in defying this typecasting, like Kathryn Bigelow, but the business is littered with tales of storytellers who couldn't escape the box in which they were placed.
Up until now, Sterlin Harjo's career has been built on telling stories from an Indigenous point of view. There are occasionally white characters — like the one Ethan Hawke himself played in the penultimate episode of Reservation Dogs — but his films and his previous show primarily dealt with Native people and communities. So it was something of a surprise to see Harjo's Rez Dogs follow-up be a star vehicle for Hawke, and to have most of the prominent supporting characters be played by the likes of Kyle MacLachlan, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Tim Blake Nelson, and Keith David (who isn't white but also isn't Native). The show has Kaniehtiio Horn playing Samantha, and it has all three of Lee's employees at the bookstore. But they've all been tangential to the story at best to this point. (Waylon and Henry are almost entirely comic relief.)