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Reckoning with history on "Reservation Dogs." 

- INKOO KANG

In American pop culture, coming of age tends to be a solo endeavor. Adolescence is when we start to define ourselves against our parents, our peers, and the forces that structure our worlds; Hollywood often distills that grappling for identity into a lone hero’s journey. But, for the teen-age quartet at the heart of the FX series “Reservation Dogs,” which just concluded its three-season run on Hulu, it’s an inherently communal experience. Early on, the foursome—Bear (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), Elora (Devery Jacobs), Cheese (Lane Factor), and Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis)—resist that revelation, convinced that their home town of Okern, Oklahoma, killed the fifth member of their group, Daniel (Dalton Cramer), who had dreamed of ditching their Muscogee rez for California beaches. Grieving for their friend a year after his suicide, the teens couldn’t see what the audience could: that dusty Okern was alive with oddballs, artists, helpers, and ways to heal. The showrunner, Sterlin Harjo, who created the series with Taika Waititi, continued expanding this mosaic for the next two seasons, in a mode spearheaded by Louis C.K.’s “Louie” and brought to its apex by Donald Glover ’s “Atlanta”: the formally and tonally mercurial, auteur-driven, detour-prone, impressionistic halfhour dramedy. (Call it “the FX mood piece.”) The result can be easier to admire than to get lost in.