'Reservation Dogs' Co-Creator Reacts to Show Getting Emmy Nominations Post-Cancellation: 'We Held True to Storytelling'

The FX comedy earned four 2024 Emmy nominations despite ending with its third season last September.

July 18, 2024

Reservation Dogs co-creator Sterlin Harjo credits authenticity and strong storytelling as the reasons that his show has earned a total of five Emmy nominations.

Despite the FX comedy's cancellation during its third and final season last September, on Wednesday, it was announced as a nominee for Outstanding Cinematography For A Single-Camera Series (Half-Hour), Outstanding Comedy Series, Outstanding Picture Editing For A Single-Camera Comedy Series and Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai). The show's first nomination was last year in the category of Outstanding Sound Editing For A Comedy Or Drama Series (Half-Hour) And Animation.

Harjo, who co-created the series with actor-director Taika Waititi, told Deadline that instead of watching the nomination announcements, he was cleaning his house before his phone blew up with congratulatory texts.

But in terms of why Reservation Dogs wasn't given Emmys recognition in its first two seasons, Harjo shared that it could've been due to racism.

"Look, I think racism isn’t violent always," he said. "It can also be that you don’t want to hear other people’s voices and I think that it was harder to reach some people. I think they have a lot of preconceived notions about what a Native show would be and that is fed by many, many, many decades of really bad representation representing us, not from our voice but from the outside."

He continued, "So I don’t blame people because Hollywood did a good job of really mucking up Native culture and I don’t blame people for not right out of the gate being drawn to watching the Native show. I think that we were an integral part of the change and the first change is not always easy. It’s like they booed Bob Dylan when he went electric. When we look back at that now, we go, 'wow, that was dumb.'"

As for pulling the plug on Reservation Dogs, in retrospect, Harjo called the show "pretty legendary" although it didn't receive its just due.

"I think we came in, we said what we wanted to say and we got out before someone else told us we should," he continued. "And I think that that should be held in higher regard these days. People kind of drag things out for the sake of money or whatever. And I think that we held true to storytelling and the story that we wanted to tell. At a certain point, the genuine nature of Reservation Dogs would’ve changed and it wouldn’t have felt genuine anymore because we told the story that we set out tell."

In a separate chat with the Los Angeles Times, Harjo shared that "people crave different stories" in connection to the Emmy nominations. "'Reservation Dogs' was kind of a new thing [that] broke a lot of barriers. When you’re doing that, you don’t necessarily always get recognized in real time. It’s something that you have to reflect on to really understand what changed," he continued. "You have to be in the future to reflect on what those things did. I always felt like 'Rez Dogs' is timeless, but people will always recognize it as this thing that broke a lot of barriers."

This year overall marks the first time that Indigenous actors have gotten more Emmy noms than past years, with Lily Gladstone and Kali Rei becoming the first Indigenous women to be nominated for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie.