FX’s series, now available on Hulu, is the rare TV comedy that knows what it is from its first scene.
It’s really rare for a TV comedy to know exactly what it is from the first scene of its first episode. Usually, these shows take at least half a season to hammer out the core relationships, the best stories for them to tell, and the strongest possible punchlines.
Even some of the best comedies spent a lot of their early seasons tweaking things. (Parks and Recreation, for instance, spent its first two seasons shedding elements that just didn’t work and zeroing in on those that did.) Comedies that are sure of themselves from the first scene exist (Cheers, Arrested Development, Atlanta, etc.), but they are few and far between.
I’ve only seen one season of FX’s terrific new comedy Reservation Dogs, but I’m happy to add it to the list. (Season one is now available on Hulu.) From the first scene of its premiere to the last scene of its finale, the show’s first season is eight episodes of sharp-witted, perfectly balanced comedy, with just enough dramatic heft. It gives the teenage characters, who are all small-time criminals trying to save up enough money to leave their Oklahoma reservation, much more weight than you might expect.
A lot has been written about the historic nature of Reservation Dogs. It’s the first American TV series ever with a writers room and directing staff composed entirely of Indigenous people from around North America and just the second with an Indigenous showrunner. (The first, Peacock’s Rutherford Falls, also debuted this year.) Said showrunner is named Sterlin Harjo, and not only did he co-create the series with Taika Waititi (himself of Maori descent), he also wrote five of the season’s eight episodes and directed three.
Harjo is a film director, with three features and a documentary to his name. (He’s also directed several shorts and episodes of other TV shows.) He and Waititi met when they were up-and-coming directors, and Waititi used his increasing muscle within the entertainment industry to help get the show made. (Waititi has a relationship at FX, having also executive produced and directed two episodes of the Emmy-nominated What We Do in the Shadows, which is spun off from his film of the same name.)
But despite Waititi’s bigger name, Reservation Dogs is very much Harjo’s show, with a unique and witty visual style all his own. One sequence set during a hunting expedition is shot entirely using wildlife cameras in a series of still shots, almost like comic panels. Dream sequences unfold with a woozy sense of the characters being trapped amid the stereotypes of Indigenous people still so common in other films and TV shows. Shots are chosen to subtly highlight the poverty and natural beauty of the characters’ surroundings, sometimes with frames that isolate the characters in one small section with the setting overwhelming them.
Lest that all sound very heady, Reservation Dogs is also tremendously funny. It opens with its four central characters pulling off a daring heist … of a truck carrying boxes of chips. (They aren’t apprehended because the local police officer is distracted with a YouTube video about Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories.)
The aforementioned dream sequences feature one of the characters meeting a Native American, in stereotypical garb, riding a horse, but he keeps trying to overinflate his prominence at the Battle of Little Bighorn and can’t stop coughing. There’s a whole episode about an elderly relative of one character attempting to sell a 15-year-old bag of weed and finding no takers in a world where marijuana has been legalized. Characters say the word “shitass” constantly, to great comedic effect.
The riskiest element of Reservation Dogs could have been the casting. The only four regular characters on the show who appear in almost every episode are four teenagers, and all are played by actors who are not widely known.
Paulina Alexis, who plays the simultaneously dry and energetic Willie Jack, seems to have had only one credit to her name before she worked on Reservation Dogs, while Lane Factor, who plays Cheese, the little brother of the group, had his first acting role in the series. The other two main stars — Devery Jacobs, who plays Elora, the girl who most wants to leave town, and D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai as Bear, the group’s de facto leader — have more experience. But Woon-A-Tai apparently had fewer than 10 credits to his name when starting work on this show.
All four actors, however, form one of the best ensembles of teen characters in recent memory. All are equally capable of comedy and drama. (Jacobs, in particular, finds new shades in a character you’ve seen many times before, the small-town girl who longs for something better.) The scenes where the four just sit around and banter back and forth have an easy chemistry that never feels forced, which is hard to do in a show this young, with actors so relatively new to the game.
The guest stars who pop up are also great. In particular, I loved Zahn McClarnon’s turn as Officer Big, who seems only half-heartedly interested in doing his job. McClarnon is an actor with a wealth of experience, but he tends to play rather somber characters. You may remember him as a hitman in season two of Fargo and as the Native American Host who gains sentience in Westworld. He’s too rarely allowed to go comedic, and Reservation Dogs lets him be incredibly silly early and often. (He’s the officer distracted by a JFK conspiracy video in the first episode.)
But beyond McClarnon, the guest cast brims with amazing performances. Indigenous rappers Lil Mike and Funny Bone pop up as a bike-riding Greek chorus, while veteran actor Gary Farmer is goofy and winded as would-be weed dealer Uncle Brownie. There’s even a surprisingly dramatic turn for standup comedian Bill Burr as a driving instructor who helps Elora process some of her most complicated emotions.
The team behind Reservation Dogs has been emphatic at every point of the show’s publicity cycle that this is not yet another story about the tragic life of the people who live on a reservation. And they’re right about that. This series is a comedy, first and foremost. But it also tells a slyly moving story about teenagers who aren’t sure how many options they have and a community where resources are stretched tighter and tighter all the time. It’s a hilarious show, but it’s also a beautiful show, all of which adds up to one of the best first seasons of a comedy in some time.
Reservation Dogs’ first season is available in on Hulu. A second season has been picked up and will likely debut in 2022. For more recommendations from the world of culture, check out the One Good Thing archives.
How a potent mix of frustration and optimism led to the Great Resignation.
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Part of the Recovery Issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world.
Working at a big-box pet-supply store was never easy. The job involved washing, grooming, and styling often anxious dogs, as well as pacifying their equally anxious owners. The hours could be long, the schedule unpredictable. But for nearly five years, Zoe Hoffeld managed.
And then the pandemic hit. After closing for a couple months in spring 2020, the dog salon in Martha’s Vineyard reopened. Understaffed, the store pressured Hoffeld, who uses they/them pronouns, to bathe or groom upwards of seven dogs a day, in addition to scheduling appointments and making reminder calls.
The safety precautions were lackluster to nonexistent. What’s more, the AC didn’t work; neither did the pipes, which caused the bathroom, as well as the area where dogs were washed, to regularly flood. A plumber was called in, but the recommended fix — shut down the location for a week to address the problem — went unheeded.
And then there were the customers, whose expectations — against the backdrop of a deadly pandemic — took on a surreal quality. Hoffeld could put hours into a single dog haircut, and have an owner respond with dissatisfaction. While most clients were understanding, others demanded fluffy perfection. “We’re human,” Hoffeld says. “We try our best and do our best but ultimately our job is to make the dog comfortable.”
At the end of a shift, “I’d go home, eat dinner, and fall asleep because I was so tired. I didn’t have the energy to do anything else. All my energy was put into work.” They were exhausted. In June, after expressing concerns about the conditions and their pay to the store supervisor to no avail, Hoffeld reached a breaking point.
So they quit.
At the onset of the pandemic, employers and consumers alike fell over themselves heralding so-called essential workers, the often low-paid individuals who didn’t have the luxury of sheltering in place.
The message only briefly obscured a harsher reality. Covid-19 amplified “the uglier side of the business,” says Nick Bunker, an economic researcher at the jobs site Indeed. Employers were quick to enact layoffs — by April 2020, the unemployment rate had skyrocketed to 14.8 percent. Those who kept their jobs had to contend with increased demands; after losing coworkers to cuts, furloughs, resignations, sickness, and death, employees took on heavier workloads, all while serving an emotional, sometimes downright belligerent public.
This played out across industries: In the first few months of lockdown, grocery stores faced labor shortages as panicked shoppers ravaged shelves; this spring and summer, freshly vaccinated diners overwhelmed understaffed restaurants and bars; and then there are the airlines, which haven’t been able to rehire fast enough to meet the rising demand in domestic travel, resulting in cancellations, delays, and lost luggage.
It’s a frustrating loop of layoffs, labor shortages, and overwork that has fallen squarely on the shoulders of workers already on the front lines of the pandemic.
A year and a half in, that collective weight has resulted in what economy-watchers are calling the Great Resignation. From April to the end of July, nearly 16 million Americans quit their jobs, a historic number. The mass exodus is particularly stark given how quickly it follows one of the largest recessions in US history. That didn’t stop 4 million people from quitting their jobs in July alone, a sign of optimism — if they leave, they can find something better — in the face of what’s shaping up to be a prolonged recovery.
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Alongside confidence, however, there’s a pervading sense of mental and physical fatigue. “For a lot of people, it’s been traumatizing,” says Chris Tilly, director of UCLA’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. In the first 10 months of the pandemic, essential workers in California experienced a 30 percent increase in deaths, according to an analysis of public health data. Specific jobs, including in health care, meatpacking, retail, and restaurants were hit especially hard.
At a single Smithfield Foods plant in South Dakota, 1,294 workers got sick. Four died. In the first year of the pandemic, New York City lost at least 136 transportation workers to Covid-19. Particularly in the beginning, when cases were skyrocketing and so much remained unclear about transmission, work presented a hellish choice: Go in and risk exposure, or stay home and forgo a paycheck.
Employers have blamed expanded unemployment benefits for people’s reluctance to go back to work, but even in states where job benefits were cut early, workers failed to return to their old jobs. (After months of strong job growth, there are already troubling indicators ahead — employers added just a third of the projected number of jobs for August, a sign that the delta variant is interfering with the economic recovery.) People are tired and demoralized. Many are also recovering from overlapping categories of trauma. Alongside the primal pain of losing someone to Covid-19, there is the emotional and physical grind of showing up every day to a high-stress, understaffed environment where safety measures aren’t consistently enforced.
That was Amanda F.’s experience, anyway. (She asked that her last name not be used as she’s about to start a new job in the industry and is concerned about professional fallout.) A pharmacy technician since 2012, she liked her job, for the most part. The pandemic changed that. The workload increased abruptly — she was tasked with facilitating Covid-19 tests in addition to filling prescriptions and administering vaccines — as the number of employees dwindled. Some shifts, it was just her and a pharmacist.
The pace was unrelenting. Rushing to fill backlogged prescriptions, she’d hear, “Pickup, lane one,” and have to dart over to the drive-through window. Meanwhile, “The phone is ringing; there are nine phone calls in the queue,” she says. “It’s just me and a pharmacist, and I’m saying, ‘How are we supposed to do all of this? All I feel like doing is crying and walking out.” Customers, frustrated by the long wait times, could be impatient, sometimes outright hostile.
The anxiety began to manifest itself physically. Amanda started eating lunch a couple of hours before she left for a closing shift; if she ate any later, she says, she risked throwing up the meal while at work.
Like Hoffeld, Amanda was exhausted, not just by the work but also the lack of understanding or compassion from customers. In September, she quit too.
Typically, leisure, hospitality, and retail have the highest quit rates, Bunker says. It’s not surprising: The pay is typically low, the turnover high. These sectors have seen the largest proportional increase in quit rates compared with those before the pandemic. As with the broader economy, the recession and subsequent recovery have taken an existing trend in these sectors and amplified it. People in low-wage jobs are quitting in search of higher pay and benefits — as well as relief from extended periods of overwork. “If you don’t have enough coworkers, there is presumably a period of time where you can pick up that slack,” Bunker says. “But after some time, you are going to realize you need backup.”
More work for the same pay is not a recipe for retention. While employers categorize the tight labor market as a labor shortage, that’s a misnomer, says Françoise Carré, research director of the Center for Social Policy at the University of Massachusetts Boston. “When you hear employers saying, ‘I can’t find workers,’ they can’t find workers for the wages they’re willing to pay right now,” she says.
There are signs that pay is trending upward. A number of Fortune 500 companies, including Costco, McDonald’s, Amazon, Chipotle, Bank of America, and CVS, have announced plans to raise the starting or average pay for hourly workers. Meanwhile, the average wage of restaurant and supermarket workers recently surpassed $15 an hour for the first time, a milestone that some workers have been lobbying for since 2012.
Employers — notably, bigger companies with the resources to enact these changes quickly — are also adding benefits, including paid time off, sick leave, and tuition reimbursement. Target recently said it will cover tuition at select undergraduate programs for part-time and full-time front-line workers. This follows Walmart’s announcement in July that it will cover tuition and book costs for all its employees.
In addition to more money, workers are able to shop around for roles that are a better fit. Amanda is slated to start a new pharmacy technician job at a different company later this month.
The pay is slightly higher ($19 an hour versus $18.55), but the real advantage is that the location is closed-door, which means she won’t have to interact with customers.
<img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-Demand and the high quit rate have made the field slightly better for job seekers and workers over the past few months. But it’s important to put wage gains in context, says Enrique Lopezlira, the director of the low-wage work program at the University of California Berkeley Labor Center. Even with higher starting pay at large companies, “We’re still looking at people making between $26,000 and $30,000 a year, which is not that great.” Many low-wage jobs not only lack health insurance, sick leave, and fixed schedules, they are also physically and emotionally taxing. “People settled for that, but they weren’t necessarily thrilled with those jobs,” UCLA’s Tilly says.
This is true for essential workers, as well as for entry-level workers hoping to break into white-collar professions. After receiving a master’s degree in communications in May 2020, Maggie, 30, who asked that her last name not be used so as not to risk her current position, sent out nearly 100 applications for jobs in her area, but steady work remained out of reach. “I was applying to all levels of jobs,” she says. “Jobs I thought were quote-unquote ‘above’ my skill level, jobs below my skill level, anything that had to do with communications.”
A year after graduating, she was hired as a contract legal assistant to a personal injury attorney in Wisconsin. The office job involves some writing. And there’s a reliable, if modest, paycheck (though no benefits or sick leave). Beyond that, it’s hard to come up with many positives. She’s on the phone with clients all day, most of whom are checking on the status of their cases. “We have people that will just call in and cry,” she says. “People have had shit years.” Sometimes they take it out on her. “It can be as bad as it was when I was waitressing,” she says.
Worse than that is the feeling that work is sucking the life out of her. Her dream is to one day support herself through writing, a practice she tries to maintain. But after a full day spent typing on a computer, “When I get home, I don’t want to do it for myself,” she says. “It’s kind of like you are giving up your soul — like a vampire. I’m giving up everything for a job that I don’t even like, that I’m not even passionate about.”
Maggie continues to hunt for better job opportunities, but the available pickings for her location and experience level remain slim; without another offer lined up, she can’t quit, even though she wants to. “It’s either this or not knowing how I’m going to pay my rent or bills,” she says.
While retail workers have more immediate options, leaving a job for a better-paying one isn’t always easy or even possible. A vast swath of low-wage jobs don’t offer predictable hours. Shifts fluctuate wildly from week to week, often with little or no notice. For anyone with responsibilities outside work — children or relatives to take care of, classes to attend, or simply social commitments — it’s not a sustainable model. Sure, the local CVS or Target might pay more, but if the available shifts don’t work with your schedule, it’s not a feasible option.
There’s also the matter of getting to work in the first place. The nationwide affordable housing crisis means workers must spend more time commuting, a reality that’s not just time-consuming but expensive as well. (In 2019, the average one-way commute in the US reached an all-time high of 27 minutes. For workers who take public transit, that figure goes up to 46 minutes.) The opportunity cost of a longer commute versus the advantage of slightly higher pay doesn’t always level out.
That’s the case for Mendy Hughes, 47, a cashier at a Walmart in Arkansas and a member of United for Respect, a nonprofit fighting for better conditions and pay for retail workers. She’s been at the company for 11 years and makes just $11.85 an hour. The past 18 months, she says, have been grueling. On many of her shifts, the store was understaffed, either because coworkers were out with Covid-19 or because the chain has struggled to hire and retain employees. Often, there aren’t enough people to adequately assist customers. “They’re stressed, we’re stressed,” Hughes says, an emotion that frequently curdles into anger directed her way.
At the end of a shift, “I’m just relieved it’s over,” she says. But Hughes doesn’t plan on leaving, even though she could make more at another big-box retailer. Her commute is a five-minute drive. Working somewhere else would require a more reliable car, something that’s not in the cards right now.
There’s also no guarantee the additional money would last. The retail industry, which has passionately fought attempts to raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25, is predicated on a model of cheap prices at the expense of higher salaries or benefits. While hourly wages traditionally go up when labor is in short supply, the “downside is, it’s cyclical,” Tilly says. “Once labor becomes more plentiful, [employers] let those investments slide, you let inflation eat away at the value of those wages.”
<img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-“The labor shortage giveth, and the end of the labor shortage taketh away,” Tilly says.
The result is a system that requires flexibility and promptness from workers but fails to provide any of the structural support that would enable them to realistically meet these demands. The onus rests with the individual, an expectation that allows employers to abdicate responsibility. This was true before the pandemic, but Covid-19 placed systemic problems in sharp relief. Workers were expected to show up every day and risk their health for far less than a living wage, without the support of child care or benefits. What was a raw deal before became, for many, untenable.
Hoffeld experienced this dynamic at the company level. Their employer didn’t provide hazard pay, benefits, or even, at times, working AC and plumbing, but still expected them to show up, without complaint and with a smile, for $16.75 an hour.
For Maggie, the past year and a half has affected her in ways she’s only started to unpack. After graduating, she lived off unemployment for stretches, an experience that sparked something of an identity crisis. “We are very indoctrinated to believe that a lot of our worth is in productivity,” she says. “Not having a job, I had a very difficult time. I felt like I was doing nothing, like I was participating in nothing. It was really hard for me to relax.”
But where she now finds herself may be worse. In exchange for a job that (barely) covers her bills, she feels like she’s handed over her soul. Days are shaped by the ebb and flow of dread. Mornings are bad; upon waking, she confronts the yawning hours of phone calls that await her at the office. She’s tired before she leaves the house.
It’s a hamster wheel that’s equally exhausting and motivating. Mentally drained at the end of the day, she forces herself back online to job-search. This isn’t what she wants long term.
For Amanda, the pandemic has been more clarifying. After quitting, she vowed never again. The next time she changes positions, she has a list of questions to bring to the interview:
“What’s your turnover rate like? What do you do for short-staffing situations? How do you ensure the safety of not only your technicians but also your customers?”
The price was steep, but Amanda now feels a greater sense of control over her career. She has a better grasp on what she’s looking for and, just as important, the conditions she will no longer tolerate. The strong quit rate indicates she’s far from alone, even if the long-term impact is still up in the air. If demand from employers falters, workers might be forced to renegotiate what, exactly, they are willing to put up with.
For her part, however, Amanda isn’t compromising. “I can’t get back into this situation,” she says.
Laura Entis is a former editor at Fortune and former staff writer at Entrepreneur magazine. She previously wrote about the reckoning for small business amid Covid-19 and the effects of Zoom and other communication technology on loneliness for The Highlight.
If you want to make a difference, find a neglected problem no one is working on.
As a journalist who isn’t too many years removed from his misspent youth, I get a fair number of emails from readers who are either in college or recent graduates asking for advice on what to do with the rest of their lives.
Sometimes my correspondents know what they want to do with their careers (usually journalism). But many don’t. They care deeply about making the world a better place, but they don’t know the best way to do that.
The world has so many problems: persistent poverty and hunger, mass torture and slaughter of animals, ongoing and worsening climate disasters, the emergence of weapons and diseases that could end life as we know it. If you just want to do something good, how do you choose?
For more specific advice on career paths, I usually point people to 80,000 Hours, an effective altruist group that specifically researches careers that can produce a lot of good. They even have a quiz you can take to decide which of the world’s problems you can use your career to focus on.
But my more general advice, learned in part from the good people at 80,000 Hours, is to think about all the social issues and problems that most motivate your friends — and then pick something different.
That might sound strange, so let me explain. The world is a big, complex system full of immense problems. The problems that are more obvious, or that already have lots of people working on them, present themselves most readily to young idealists and altruists. But that leaves many severe, much less obvious problems neglected. And neglected issues are often the ones where you can do the most good.
I want to be clear here. If you’re already deeply passionate about some topic or issue, pursue it. Passion is not a very easy commodity to transfer. And most people’s passions point them to problems that are genuinely very important.
Take education. Making sure it functions well and equitably is incredibly consequential.
But precisely because of that, many, many young people are drawn to become teachers, going into Teach for America, into the public education system, or in education-adjacent careers in advocacy or policy. Moreover, the government spends hundreds of billions of dollars on the effort each year, and philanthropists spend billions more.
If that’s the cause you’re truly passionate about — Godspeed! Both my parents taught high school, and I have the highest regard for the vocation and anyone working to improve it.
But if you’re open to other directions and are looking to have the highest impact possible, you should see all the money and energy pouring into K-12 as a sign that lots of smart people are already working on that problem — which means you might have more impact elsewhere.