There is a famous Hollywood story, from the 1920s, in which art director Cedric Gibbons went to MGM production chief Irving Thalberg to protest that a scene set in Paris called for a moonlit ocean in the background in a city with no ocean. “We can’t cater to a handful of people who know Paris,” Thalberg said. The ocean stayed.
I think we can agree that Paris is better — or, at any rate, more Paris — without the ocean.
Being a Southern California boy whose grandparents came to America as children from what is now the Ukraine around the turn of the last century, I am certainly not qualified to say whether “Reservation Dogs,” streaming on FX on Hulu, paints an accurate picture of life, or a slice of it, on and around the tribal lands of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation in eastern Oklahoma, here referred to simply as “Indian territory.” I have traveled in that neck of the woods (and fields) and can only say that, yes, that is what it looks like — and that this show, in which four tribal teens steal things and sell meat pies to raise the money to go to California to avoid the fate of a dead friend, is charming, funny and a little bit beautiful.
But Sterlin Harjo (“Four Sheets to the Wind”), who co-created the series with Taika Waititi (“Jojo Rabbit,” “What We Do in the Shadows”), and directed select episodes, is a member of the Seminole Nation with Muscogee ancestry and grew up in Holdenville, Oklahoma, about 60 miles southwest of Okmulgee where the series was largely filmed (Waititi, from New Zealand, is Maori on his father’s side — different country, similar dynamic.) As the old advice goes, he is writing what he knows.