Reservation Dogs and Derry Girls are alike in how they tell stories about teens growing up in hard times

The Ringer

Each show is a "half-hour comedy that manages the neat trick of being immediately relatable to anyone who’s ever been a teenager while simultaneously depicting something unfamiliar to many viewers’ experiences," says Elizabeth Nelson. "Each of our heroes’ misadventures reveals something new about reservation life to outsiders—its pleasures and deprivations, and the ways in which the two frequently overlap. In the second episode, a beatdown of the show’s lead character Bear Smallhill (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai) results in a surreal guided tour of the reservation’s health care system. Later, an effort at consulting a tribal elder on the specifics of fistfighting results in a fruitless attempt at helping him offload a raft of sadly impotent homegrown weed. With each comic tribulation we feel the protagonists being torn between loyalty to tradition and desire for upward mobility growing equally in both directions. That this tension is ultimately unresolvable is Reservation Dogs’ home truth. Stay or go—it doesn’t really matter. Who you are is just another way of saying where you’re from. Derry Girls and Reservation Dogs are hardscrabble stories told with such unabashed mirth that they can feel genuinely subversive."