Two Navajo police officers, a double murder, and a desert landscape that keeps its own secrets — Dark Winds sets a 1970s crime story against a world where investigation and belief cannot be separated.
What is Dark Winds about?
Set in the American Southwest of the 1970s, the series follows Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, two Navajo Tribal Police officers pulled into a double murder that resists an easy explanation. As leads dry up and the case pushes against forces neither man expected, they are forced to confront their own spiritual beliefs alongside the physical evidence in front of them. The investigation moves through reservation land and small communities where old tensions and newer crimes overlap, and every answer the two officers find seems to open a harder question about who they are protecting and from what.
About the cast
Zahn McClarnon leads as Leaphorn opposite Kiowa Gordon's Chee, with Jessica Matten, Rainn Wilson, Noah Emmerich and Eugene Brave Rock rounding out a cast built around a story that treats its Southwest setting as more than backdrop.
Context & significance
Dark Winds is a 2022 thriller series built on Tony Hillerman's Leaphorn & Chee novels, a long-running crime franchise known for grounding its mysteries in Navajo culture and law rather than treating the reservation as scenery for an outside detective. The show leans into that same approach, using its 1970s setting to explore jurisdiction, tradition and suspicion between communities without losing the pull of a straightforward murder investigation. Each episode runs close to 47 minutes, giving the mystery room to breathe rather than rushing toward a resolution.
Watching Dark Winds on Ktime
Dark Winds streams on K-Time with Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles included, so the mystery plays in Farsi from the first scene if that's how you prefer to watch. A free K-Time account is all that's needed to log in and start the series, on a platform built around Farsi-first streaming for Persian-speaking audiences wherever they live.