In Rutherford Falls, the latest comedy offering from Mike Schur – creator of The Good Place, Brooklyn 99 and Parks and Recreation – a small-town patriot, played by Ed Helms, finds his whole world starting to crumble when a push begins to tear down the statue of the town founder and his ancestor. Given the heated arguments reverberating around the world in recent times about statues, and whether the sometimes-dubious characters they honour make them unfit for public display, one could assume that the show was ripped from the headlines, written and shot in quick order to respond to the political climate.
But according to Schur, the fact that Rutherford Falls came along at a historical moment that chimed perfectly with the show’s themes was a happy coincidence. “Ed and I started talking about the character and the idea of a statue in 2016 – Charlottesville happened soon thereafter and we were like, well this changes everything and suddenly statues are everywhere. We actually had to go back into the pilot and add a line for the mayor of the town, saying, ‘it’s not a great time for people who like statues’. That was added later because we wrote it so long ago that that wasn’t necessarily the deal.”
As Nathan Rutherford, Ed Helms (pictured with Dana L. Wilson and Jana Schmieding) has a serious case of ancestor worship in the culture-class comedy Rutherford Falls.Credit:Colleen Hayes/Peacock
The true genesis of the show came not from the news, but from discussions between friends Schur and Helms – who had worked together on the US Office – about what sort of project they’d like to team up on. “We started from a very organic place of, what interests us about the world, what are some things we’ve noticed, what are some human behavioural traits that are worthy of investigation?” Schur recalls. “Ed mentioned a podcast he had heard about something called the Backfire Effect, which is a psychological phenomenon that when people are confronted with things that run contrary to core beliefs that they hold, they’re much more likely to double down on the wrong take than they are to accept the new information and alter their behaviour.”
From that idea was born Nathan Rutherford, a man whom Schur describes as “a good person who means well and is kind and empathetic, and also he has a blind spot. And that blind spot comes from a deep, unwilling-to-change connection to this one story, of his family.” It’s that family story that the hapless Nathan finds suddenly clashing with opposing narratives – in particular, that of the local Native American nation, whose take on the exploits of Nathan’s ancestor is, unsurprisingly, a little different. At this point the tale broadens out and becomes about a lot more than one guy with a slightly unhealthy case of ancestor worship. Here is where the input of Schur’s co-creator Sierra Teller Ornelas, who made Rutherford Falls the first-ever comedy with a Native American showrunner, became crucial to the final product. Schur and Helms, both white men, turned to Ornelas, a veteran writer on shows such as Superstore and Brooklyn 99 to tell the story they were looking for.
“When I started 10 years ago, I would mention it (a sitcom about Native Americans) and a lot of people were like, that’ll never happen,” says Ornelas, who sees the show as a breakthrough in representation for Native Americans. “I think this is a monumental moment for Natives in the media. For example, Michael Greyeyes (who plays the Native head of the Rutherford Falls casino) is an incredible actor, and he usually plays a heavy – he’s usually very scary, he’s got a gun – and here he’s a dad, he gets to be very smart and strategic, and he’s also very funny. This is a chance for people to see that on television, and for me that’s a monumental moment for sure.”
Co-creator Sierra Teller Ornelas; Rutherford Falls is the first-ever comedy with a Native American showrunner.Credit:Reginald Cunningham via AP
“There’s all of these watersheds for any under-represented group in the media,” adds Schur. “There’s the first time any member of that group is on television, there’s the first time there’s a show where there’s more than one of them. And the only way to approach a show that any group can call its own is where it’s at least fifty-fifty – half of this show is this group of people. Because that’s the only way you get multifarious points of view, it’s not a monolith, it’s not like everyone thinks this one thing. The way that actual three-dimensionality and equality occurs is when there are enough people representing any group that you can get, like, 11 different angles on one issue.”
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The issue of viewpoint diversity is central to the show’s exploration – in humorous, slightly whimsical terms – of race relations and in particular of history, and how people engage with their past – represented strongly in the show by the statue in the centre of town. “What I find interesting about the metaphor of the statue,” says Ornelas, “is that it’s finite, it’s permanent, and it’s meant to always stay static. I find that history is constantly changing, our knowledge of the people who came before us and how they impact our lives now is constantly changing.”
April 28, 2021 at 01:00PM
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Finding the funny in toppled statues, race and contested histories - Sydney Morning Herald
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