‘This Is What We Should Have Had All Along’

In a group interview, Native American TV creators and performers discuss the significance of “Reservation Dogs” and “Rutherford Falls,” and why this is only the beginning.

“What we’ve been doing this last year is way bigger than I had in my dreams,” the Ponca and Ojibwe writer and producer Migizi Pensoneau said recently. “You think it’s going to be this incremental thing and then suddenly there are these two massive TV shows, and the aftershocks are going to be massive, too.” The two shows he is referring to are “Reservation Dogs,” which arrives Monday on FX on Hulu, and “Rutherford Falls,” which premiered in April on the NBCUniversal streaming service Peacock, and has been renewed for another season. They are vastly different comedies. The first, created by Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi (“Thor: Ragnarok”), is a genre-mixing series about four Indigenous teenagers in Oklahoma. The second, from Sierra Teller Ornelas (“Superstore”), Michael Schur (“The Good Place”) and Ed Helms (“The Office”), is a sweetly biting sitcom that re-examines an upstate New York town’s colonial history.