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- By Native News Online Staff
TIME Magazine named Reservation Dogs the best television show of 2023 along with Succession. The two shows tied for the best slot because TIME's television critic couldn't decide which one was number one.
"For the first time in my career, I just couldn’t decide which of two series—both of which wrapped up nearly flawless runs this year—most brilliantly fulfilled the potential of the TV medium in the year 2023," Berman said.
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The series followed the lives of four Native American teenagers living in rural Oklahoma, first premiered in 2021 and was an immediate hit among critics and audiences alike.
In naming Reservation Dogs as the best televison show, TIME Magazine said the following about the show:
"Reservation Dogs, by contrast, never chased the mainstream zeitgeist. Instead of homing in on the 1% of the 1%, Sterlin Harjo’s half-hour dramedy chronicled the hijinks of disenfranchised outsiders: four Native American teens on an Oklahoma reservation mourning a friend who died by suicide. Profane, poignant, and sometimes psychedelic, the series moved fluidly between coming-of-age awkwardness, small-town character comedy, and the spiritual immediacy that comes with growing up with ancient traditions in a place that has seen so many untimely deaths. While the teenage Rez Dogs remained at the show’s center, learning how to become adults from the elders around them, its circle never stopped expanding until it encompassed the entire fictional community of Okern—young and old, present and absent, living and spectral. In its final season, you never knew, going in, what kind of journey an episode was going to take you on. One rode a time machine to the 1970s; another reunited college-bound Elora (Devery Jacobs) with a long-lost father played by Ethan Hawke. A cast blessed with veterans like Zahn McClarnon and Gary Farmer but anchored by newcomers breathed vitality into every frame."
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