Taika Waititi’s Open-Hearted Television Empire
Taika Waititi has been asking those questions for five years now, and many of his answers have been nothing short of extraordinary. Waititi is a New Zealand filmmaker who came up in the early aughts, making slightly twee, off-kilter dramedies about life in his home country, several of which feature large ensemble casts of relatively unknown Indigenous actors. After the breakout buzz from his surprisingly tender 2014 vampire mockumentary film, What We Do in the Shadows, and the festival success of the slapstick adventure Hunt for the Wilderpeople,Waititi received the reward so many young independent filmmakers like him either lust after or flee: control of a Marvel franchise. His 2017 Thor: Ragnarok was a commercial and critical hit—as critical to the MCU’s revitalization as the following year’s sensation, Black Panther—and Waititi himself became something of a celebrity. The gates of Hollywood opened before him. As a filmmaker, Waititi quickly worked to squander all that goodwill with a handful of ill-advised feature projects—including Jojo Rabbit, in which Waititi stars as Adolf Hitler—but as a television producer, he shone.
Waititi is a somewhat unlikely media mogul. In comparison to titanic movers and shakers like Shonda Rhimes, Ryan Murphy, and Taylor Sheridan, Waititi is a boutique figure. He hasn’t generated the zillions those impresarios have, nor has he created the same kind of culture-shifting iconic watercooler series, but, for the past five years or so, Taika Waititi has busily and carefully produced a roster of some of the most compelling, bespoke, weird little televisual objects I’ve seen in a long time. What We Do in the Shadows, Reservation Dogs, Our Flag Means Death—in an era of reboots, spin-offs, and limited series, Waititi’s stable of oddities are defiantly original, rambling, rollicking, freewheeling concepts. Each of these shows created the niches they would come to occupy. Each of these shows resists the cynicism that grounds so many successful comedies—in order to reach for something harder, more human, even.
Many of these projects might sound, on first description, like little more than a bit, the beginnings of a comedy sketch or a viral video concept. Gay pirates. Dumb vampires. Native American teens in Tarantino cosplay. It’s easy to bet against the longevity of pitches like these. But Waititi’s gift has been in finding and trusting writers who have an alternate vision of what might work in TV comedy and using his prominence to get these weird and good ideas on-screen. The first show Waititi created after his Marvel success, 2019’s What We Do in the Shadows, a TV adaptation of his 2014 film, comes to an end this winter, just as his latest project, Interior Chinatown—created by Charles Yu, based on his novel of the same name—premieres. Both shows understand the cruelty and stupidity of their worlds, but from the outset they find hopefulness in escape, in resistance, and in refusal.
