Sterlin Harjo, the Reservation Dogs creator who never left Oklahoma

Sterlin Harjo

Photo: Danielle G. Campbell / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	November 14, 1979 Holdenville, Oklahoma, United States
Occupation	Filmmaker and television creator
Awards	Peabody · Peabody Trailblazer · MacArthur Fellowship · Independent Spirit

The new season of The Lowdown opens with a man being rewarded for telling the truth and hating every second of it. Ethan Hawke‘s Lee Raybon, the Tulsa bookseller who calls himself a “truthstorian”, climbs onstage to collect a local media prize, drunk, and tells the room it is full of sellouts. Sterlin Harjo, who created the series and wrote the scene, has said it comes straight from his own life. When Reservation Dogs took off, he was living in a studio loft in downtown Tulsa, and “all of a sudden I had a TV show.” He told Variety he did not handle it well.

That admission is a useful key to everything else he has made. Harjo’s characters are people uneasy with the version of themselves the world hands back to them, and almost none of them solve the problem by leaving Oklahoma. Neither has he.

Holdenville, the small town where Harjo was born on November 14, 1979, and where he grew up, had a prison, and he has described watching it change the town for the worse. He is a citizen of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma and a Muscogee descendant. He studied art and film at the University of Oklahoma, and a Sundance Institute fellowship in 2004 opened the first door. His short Goodnight, Irene played at the Sundance Film Festival the following year.

The features that followed were small, patient and stubbornly local. Four Sheets to the Wind, which premiered at Sundance in 2007 and was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize, follows a young Seminole man who leaves his hometown for Tulsa after his father’s death, and won its co-star Tamara Podemski a special jury prize. Barking Water, in 2009, put a dying man and his former lover on a road trip across the state to Wewoka, the capital of the Seminole Nation. The documentary This May Be the Last Time, at Sundance in 2014 went looking for his own grandfather, who vanished near Sasakwa in 1962, and traced the Muscogee hymns at the center of that story to Scottish folk and gospel. Mekko, a thriller set in Tulsa, premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival in 2015. Harjo has called himself, in those years, “a kind of quiet independent filmmaker hoping to get some attention from anyone in this industry.”

A louder track ran in parallel. Harjo is a founding member of the 1491s, a Native sketch comedy group whose humor runs straight through his television work. He also directed short pieces for This Land Press in Tulsa. His second documentary, Love and Fury, finished in 2020, spent time with Indigenous artists including the poet Joy Harjo and the novelist Tommy Orange, and Netflix released it the following year.

Then came Reservation Dogs. Co-created with Taika Waititi and launched on FX on Hulu in August 2021, the series followed four Native teenagers in rural Oklahoma who want nothing more than to get to California. When it won best new scripted series at the Independent Spirit Awards, the actor Devery Jacobs told the room it was “the first project with all Indigenous creatives at the helm.” The show collected a Peabody Award and a Golden Globe nomination, though Emmy voters only came round in its final season, with a nomination for outstanding comedy series in 2024. By then Harjo had already ended it. In June 2023 he announced that the third season would be the last, calling it the correct creative decision and a difficult one to make.

The easy reading of Harjo’s career is the one his trophies tell: the trailblazer who opened television to Native storytellers. It is accurate and also too small. The Lowdown hands the lead to a white bookseller, played by Hawke and loosely modeled on the late Tulsa historian Lee Roy Chapman, and pushes the Native history into the plot’s buried layer: Lee is chasing a powerful Tulsa family he suspects of having long concealed violence against Native people. That is a deliberate change of angle, and it has costs. The ensemble intimacy of Reservation Dogs gives way to a genre engine that, in NPR’s verdict on the first season, sometimes meanders or misfires. Harjo has been frank about the pressure behind it, describing the second season as “more painful than anything” to write, with episodes still being written deep into production. “I hope I never have to do that again!” The director who closed his first hit on his own terms is now inside the renewal cycle, asking the “gods of TV” for a third season.

Harjo co-wrote Rez Ball, a basketball drama directed by Sydney Freeland, which Netflix released in September 2024, and that same year he was named a MacArthur Fellow, the only filmmaker in the class. FX ordered the pilot of The Lowdown in February 2024, under the working title The Sensitive Kind, and the series had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2025 and reached FX later that month. It shares a fictional universe with Reservation Dogs, where Hawke had played a different character, and the pilot confirms it with a cameo by Paulina Alexis as Willie Jack.

FX renewed it in January 2026. The second season sends Lee after a client of Ginger, a public defender played by Betty Gilpin, who has disappeared inside the Oklahoma prison system. The production shot inside the McAlester prison where he visited his uncle as a child. The other shock is Tommy Lee Jones as Lee Raybon Sr., the father Lee told his own daughter was dead. Harjo thought of Jones as soon as he finished writing the first episode, and Jones, who had already watched the first season, told him his favorite characters were the two bookstore security guards.

Harjo received the Peabody Trailblazer Award in Beverly Hills on May 31, 2026, with the jurors singling out the network of Indigenous collaborators he keeps hiring, from the actor Kaniehtiio Horn to the directors Sydney Freeland and Danis Goulet and the writers Dallas Goldtooth and Ryan RedCorn. In April he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he is a distinguished visiting artist in film studies at the University of Tulsa through 2026.

The second season of The Lowdown premiered on FX and Hulu on October 14, 2026, streams on Disney+ outside the United States, and runs weekly until its finale on November 25. Harjo has compared it to The Empire Strikes Back: a chapter that stands on its own and leaves the audience wanting the next one. Whether FX grants him that third season is the open question of his career right now, and the answer will still be shot in Oklahoma.