FX on Hulu’s “Reservation Dogs” is the summer’s must-see TV.

The four teens at the heart of the new Native American comedy “Reservation Dogs” have organized their lives around a shared conviction: The place they call home is trying to kill them. They have no reason to believe otherwise; the previous year, the group lost Daniel, the fifth member of their crew. To escape Okern, Okla. — a colorful rural town where passersby are equally likely to be in a car, on a bike or atop a horse — the two boys and two girls steal whatever it takes (trucks, steaks, copper wiring from street lamps) to grow their California fund.

Created by Oklahoma filmmaker Sterlin Harjo and “Jojo Rabbit” director Taika Waititi, FX on Hulu’s “Reservation Dogs” is the second show to debut this year with a Native American focus (the other being Peacock’s “Rutherford Falls”). But the closest analogue to “Dogs” might be its corporate cousin “Atlanta” (FX), Donald Glover’s seldom laugh-out-loud half-hour series about a small cadre of friends struggling to “make it” in their own idiosyncratic ways.

“Reservation Dogs” skews decidedly younger — its cast of charming, comically deft newcomers play high schoolers — but both shows find their main characters on unexpected sojourns within their hometowns. While Glover’s Earn encounters the bizarre and the transcendent in his urban adventures, D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai’s Bear and his friends inadvertently introduce us to their quirky, often tender community, which envelops them so completely they have trouble seeing it.

Are they a gang? Bear wouldn’t have thought so, but suddenly he — along with hardnosed Elora (Devery Jacobs), tomboyish Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis) and clueless Cheese (Lane Factor) — find themselves described in those terms by a band of outsiders who’ve recently settled in Okern and are determined to prove their mettle by taking down the local toughs. To his shock, the local toughs turn out to be them, even though he’s thus far flown under the radar of dopey sheriff Big (Zahn McClarnon of “Fargo”), and for a teenage boy, he’s very nearly a sweetie to his single mom, Rita (an underutilized Sarah Podemski).

This delicate balance between innocence and precarity is the key to the wistful winsomeness of “Dogs.” There’s a subtle but resolute refusal to sugarcoat the lives of young people in dusty, empty Okern; at least two of Bear’s friends have dead or absent parents, and his own father (played by real-life hip-hop artist Sten Joddi) abandoned him for a fledgling novelty-rap career. Set at a health clinic, the second episode — guest-starring Jana Schmieding of “Rutherford Falls” — reveals an alarming fleet of medical issues already faced by the teens.

With Native American popcultural representation so lacking, the creative team behind “Reservation Dogs” — the first TV series to boast an all-Indigenous writers room, director corps and central cast — surely had a lot to say. But the spirit of the show is exploratory, not sociological.

Larks and capers drive the show, as in the third episode, when the teens visit Elora’s elderly Uncle Brownie (Gary Farmer), a storied bar fighter, in the hopes that Bear can pick up some brawling tips for when the rival gang decides to give him another beatdown.

From the pilot on, “Reservation Dogs” arrives fully formed, with a cinematic eye for its sunbaked environs (shot on location in Oklahoma) and sourced from what feels like a close-knit network of talent. Harjo is, for example, a comedy partner of Dallas Goldtooth, who plays a somewhat inept 19th-century warrior ghost encouraging a knocked-out Bear to strive for more than grand theft auto.

Bear’s journey is engagingly detailed in the four episodes screened for critics (of eight total), so it’s a bit disappointing that the show fails to deepen any of the other characters, even to establish their friendship dynamics. Given the “Smurfs”-like gender ratio of Waititi’s otherwise superb FX series “What We Do in the Shadows,” it would be a missed opportunity to continue underdeveloping, especially the promising female roles.

But it’s always a treat to see Okern’s identical unofficial town criers (Lil Mike and Funnybone, the 4-foot-8 rapper brothers who appeared on “America’s Got Talent”) popping out of nowhere to give Bear disheartening updates on his own feud with the other gang. Perhaps more than anyone else in town, they embody Okern’s knack for surprise. Sometimes it’s the places where nothing ever seems to happen where anything can happen.