Rutherford Falls S2 discussion
Click to viewS2 is now streaming!
Ed Helms and Jana Schmieding on their characters’ platonic love story
Jana Schmieding: Reagan and Nathan’s friendship is everlasting. It’s strong enough to survive Nathan’s identity crisis. We show Nathan confronting his white privilege and trying to de-center himself, and of course, he’s doing so clumsily. So there were a lot of great jokes about him as a white ghost haunting the cultural center. He comes back to his hometown and finds a home in his friendship with her, and we’re setting up his journey for this season: How do you reestablish roots in a place that isn’t yours? Which is a subversive commentary in the same way that we did with Season 1 in taking Nathan’s land and making him live on it on Minishonka terms. We are positioning Nathan this season to experience what it’s like to have your history and identity de-centered in the national narrative, in funny ways!
Ed Helms: White dudes have had a pretty good run for a long time, and I’m really enjoying the challenge of questioning the ways that white males navigate the world, and the things that I think white males have taken for granted. It’s a fertile area! It’s full of questions. It’s full of uncertainty. It’s fraught. It feels creatively treacherous, in a good way.
It’s rare to see a show that hinges on the relationship between a man and a woman who do date each other’s genders but never romantically pursue one another. Can you walk through the development of their platonic love story?
Schmieding: I have had many friendships with non-Native men and cis-hetero men. It’s rarely given space on TV, but that experience is much more common than we are led to believe. And they’re old friends; they’re like siblings! We have a term in Lakota called “tiyospaye,” which is extended family, and that includes close friends. It’s family-slash-community. Reagan and Nathan have that kind of a dynamic.
Helms: We like to joke that it’s a bromance between a man and a woman. We wanted the central relationship to explore different gender experiences but also be unconditionally supportive and loving. Their backgrounds as a white man and a Native American woman are a huge part of their existence, and it colors so much of what they understand about each other and what they don’t understand about each other. They both push through moments of pretty unsympathetic behavior, and I love seeing two characters as different as they are being so committed to one another.
THR review of S2
As ever, Rutherford Falls‘ humor runs more wry than gut-busting, this time with even less emotionally explosive drama to tip it off course. And the show hasn’t lost its knack for balancing big-hearted comedy with incisive cultural commentary. One of this season’s sharpest installments sends Terry and Reagan to serve as cultural consultants on a Yellowstone-esque hit called Adirondack, to the former’s excitement and the latter’s skepticism. (“This is the place where Adam Beach dies in the first ten minutes of every movie,” Regan grumbles as they walk through the backlot.)
Rutherford Falls exudes warmth, but its optimism is one tempered by caution; the show’s faith is not in the traditions that have let these characters down for so long, but in their efforts to work around them, or to invent new ones entirely. Bobbie’s campaign is billed as a breath of fresh air, even if it’s backed by Terry (and even if the Parks & Rec fan in me can’t help wondering if they’re headed toward an Ice Town-style disaster). Reagan’s land-assignment storyline touches on the unfairness of the priority given to married couples with kids, but also inspires her to imagine a new way of life for childless women like herself. Even committed capitalist Terry finds himself admitting, this season, that there are things more important than money. With the fight over Big Larry firmly in the rearview, Rutherford Falls’, and Rutherford Falls‘, journey to a brighter future is just getting started.
Vogue: how the show continues to champion indigenous style and artists
“When it comes to jewelry, we [Native people] buy from everywhere-I have Inuit, Mohawk, Navajo, and Parfleche earrings-so I wanted Reagan to showcase that diversity in her accessorizing.”
Sourcing all the new jewelry pieces for the show turned out to be a whole adventure. “First, I made a big spreadsheet of all the designers and beaders that I thought we should purchase work from, making sure we had artists from all regions,” says Schmieding. Then, she cross-checked it with co-creator and showrunner Sierra Teller Ornelas, and the costume department began reaching out directly to the artists. “Alexis Jacks [the assistant costume designer] came back to me and was like, ‘I’m having a really hard time, because a lot of the artists are only having ‘drops’ and ‘raffles.’ She had to set an alarm [for pieces,]” laughs Schmieding. “It was really funny to expose this adorable white woman to the cut-throat world of Native jewelry acquisition. I sort of fed her to the wolves a little bit!”
For Schmieding, spotlighting Native jewelry on the show has a deeper meaning than just accessorizing, though. She shares that she’s always had a contentious relationship with fashion, but jewelry has always been her main love. “Jewelry is something that anybody can wear,” she says. “My exposure to fashion has been very limited throughout my adult life, because I wear what is considered ‘extended sizing’ or ‘plus sizes.’ Designers don’t make clothes for women with big tits and a big ass for some reason.” While she wears Indigenous clothing labels on the show like Jamie Okuma, she says jewelry truly gives her the freedom to experiment and have fun with style. “I hope that Native fashion design can soon move in a direction towards inclusive sizing, because I promise that we will make you [all] rich,” she says.
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