“Dark Winds” is set in the early 1970s, and the new AMC drama series feels like a throwback with its simple storytelling and measured pace.
But the reasonably entertaining six-episode show — which debuts this week on the cable network and its sister streaming platform, AMC+, which will offer installments one week earlier moving forward — may be more interesting behind the scenes.
According to an article in The Hollywood Reporter, executive producer Robert Redford acquired the rights to Tony Hillerman’s novels centered around Navajo tribal police officers Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee way back in 1986. Much more recently, the movie-industry giant recruited novelist George R.R. Martin — the mastermind behind the book series that spawned HBO’s “Game of Thrones” and a big Hillerman fan — to help finally bring the work to the screen.
Perhaps more noteworthy: As the THR piece explains, a significant collection of talented folks with Native American roots helped make this show — both behind the camera and in front of it — from showrunner Graham Roland to star Zahn McClarnon, a part-Lakota actor who is a big reason “Dark Winds” holds your attention.
After showing us a heist of an armored car in Gallup, New Mexico, which concludes with the criminals escaping by helicopter, the Roland-scripted debut episode, “Monster Slayer,” introduces us to McClarnon’s Leaphorn.
He is watching a man dig a hole.
“Put them back,” he instructs, the man below him then lowering several Native American cultural items into the earth. “If I catch you stealing artifacts again, the hole you’ll be digging will be a lot bigger.”
Leaphorn’s attention soon is drawn to the mysterious murder of an older man and a younger woman in a nearby motel room. He knew the young woman — as well as her blind grandmother, left alive at the scene — from Monument Valley, part of the large Navajo reservation.
Leaphorn is backed by Bernadette Manuelito (Jessica Matten), a deputy whose character is said to have been beefed up from the novels. However, more help comes in the form of another deputy, Jim Chee (Kiowa Gordon), who grew up on the reservation but hasn’t lived there since leaving for college.
Chee, who arrives at the station in a suit, after declining to stop to help a stranded motorist on the way there, clashes with Bernadette immediately. And while that dynamic will evolve over the course of this debut season, it is Chee’s developing partnership with Leaphorn — who finds reasons to be wary of his younger subordinate — that drives the show.
“Dark Winds” is boosted by appearances by Noel Emmerich as FBI Special Agent Whitover, who wants Leaphorn’s help cracking the case involving the armored car because the helicopter was spotted heading toward Navajo country. (Emmerich, the former regular on “The Americans,” apparently is the first call you make when you need to cast an FBI agent, the actor recently also playing one on the recent Apple TV+ series “Suspicion.”) Whitover and Leaphorn have, at best, an uneasy working relationship, the former being comfortable calling the latter “Kemosabe” on more than one occasion.
The second episode, “The Male Rain Approaches,” begins to tell us more about the men behind the heist and their connection to a controversial Native group, The Buffalo Society.
While “Dark Winds” largely is focused on its two cases, which may be connected, plenty of time is left over for character-driven drama, including Leaphorn’s marriage to Emma (Deanna Allison), which has been tested following the tragic death of their young-adult son. Not surprisingly, that loss also at times affects the way Leaphorn interacts with Chee.
“Dark Winds” is never edge-of-your-seat stuff, the series instead cooking at a satisfying simmer, its flavors also including a couple of fun appearances by a favorite alum of “The Office,” Rainn Wilson, as a colorful used car dealer — who, when we meet him, has a van a-rockin’.
With apologies to Gordon (“Roswell, New Mexico”) and Matten (“Tribal”), both of whom are solid, the show depends on the performance of McClarnon, and the veteran of series including “Westworld” and “Hawkeye” delivers. In his hands, Leaphorn is both admirable and relatable, a man who doesn’t try to be perfect in an imperfect place but who strives to make the world around him better.
Know that the show is holding a few impactful secrets, revealing one in the first episode and another early in the finale, the satisfying “Hozhoo Naashaa.”
As the aforementioned Hollywood Reporter also points out, the arrival of “Dark Winds” is contributing to a moment for Native content on television, begun by FX on Hulu’s “Reservation Dogs," which counts “Thor: Ragnarok” director Taika Waititi among its creative forces, and Peacock’s enjoyable “Rutherford Falls.”
We’d certainly welcome more such fare, as well as a sophomore season for “Dark Winds.”
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‘DARK WINDS’
Rating: TV-MA
How to watch: Premieres at 9 p.m. ET Sunday on AMC; streaming on AMC+
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