This article examines how two recent television series – True Detective: Night Country (2023) and Reservation Dogs (2021–23) – reinterpret foundational myths of the American frontier and wasteland. Through a comparative and interdisciplinary approach that draws on postcolonial, settler-colonial and affect theory, the article explores how both series destabilize dominant representations of American identity by foregrounding Indigenous perspectives, marginality and ecological decay. In doing so, they expose the contradictions at the heart of US national mythology: progress born from violence, civilization rooted in dispossession and identity shaped through exclusion. True Detective: Night Country reimagines the frozen frontier as a site of moral and environmental contamination, while Reservation Dogs transforms the reservation (the archetypal wasteland) into a space of resilience, community and belonging. Together, these narratives challenge the frontier’s role as a unifying myth, revealing it instead as a liminal space where trauma, resistance and memory intersect. Ultimately, this article argues that contemporary audio-visual narratives serve as crucial spaces for reimagining what America means in a postcolonial, ecologically unstable and ethically fractured world.
Emma Maria Dinuzzi (Sun,) studied this question.