Beloved Taika Waititi Series Gets Season 2 Release Date
Fans of Taika Waititi's best and funniest television series just got some good news: a release date for the upcoming second season.
Taika Waititi is rapidly becoming one of Hollywood’s great living treasures. Between directing astonishingly funny and weird films What We Do in the Shadows and Thor: Ragnarok and starring in the weirdly astonishing and funny Our Flag Means Death series on HBO, he still manages to find time to produce one of the single best television programs currently airing: Reservation Dogs. The FX comedy-drama was renewed for a second season back in September of 2021, and now the series has a release date: this coming August 3.
Reservation Dogs was created by Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi and follows a group of four Indigenous teenagers growing up in Oklahoma. The series manages a very delicate balance of humor, drama, social commentary, and David Lynch-style magic realism; the main storyline of the show is about the characters processing the recent death of one of their friends and trying to move to California. Along the way, there are encounters with potentially murderous deer ladies, a rap song about greasy frybread, and a spirit guide who died at The Battle of Little Big Horn, but by complete accident. It’s a very good and weird show as most of Taika Waititi’s projects are.
The FX series is also notable for being the first show in history to have all Indigenous writers and directors, as well as an almost entirely Indigenous cast and production team (New Zealander Taika Waititi being of Māori descent). Reservation Dogs is also the first television series to be filmed entirely in Oklahoma. The first season of the show netted them a slew of award nominations and wins; it was notably nominated for the prestigious Peabody Award and two Independent Spirit Awards and a Critics’ Choice Television Awards. The show was also included on numerous year-end best-of critical lists, including those of CNN, The New York Times, and Vogue.
The cast of Reservation Dogs primarily four young Indigenous actors, some of whom had never professionally acted before. Devery Jacobs (who portrays a character named Elora Danan, like from the George Lucas movie Willow) was recently cast in the Marvel Disney+ series Echo. Given Taika Waititi’s fondness for using the same casts in different series and movies, it seems likely we may see some of them appear in some of his many upcoming projects. The series also stars Zahn McClarnon (of Marvel’s Hawkeye and FX’s Fargo), who will soon be leading his own series, as well as noted Canadian actor Gary Farmer (of Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man and Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai).
Taika Waititi has a great number of upcoming projects, including a vocal performance in the animated Pixar film Lightyear with fellow Marvel alumnus Chris Evans. He will also be directed a movie titled Next Goal Wins, based on the 2014 documentary of the same name, which will star Michael Fassbender, Elisabeth Moss, and frequent collaborator Rhys Darby. Perhaps most anticipated of all is Thor: Love and Thunder, the MCU followup to his critically and commercially beloved Thor: Ragnarok. But for us, we are just thrilled to finally know when Reservation Dogs is coming back.
