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We’ve previously addressed here the popularity of rural and small-town crime stories, noting books and authors who specialize in lawbreakers and law-keepers in the country’s rich spaces between cities.
There are countless great novels and series about law officers dealing with unruly or murderous small-town folks, and a few have made the transition to television and streaming services.
Two recent exemplars are Amazon Prime Video’s “Reacher,” adapted from Lee Child’s series of books about a former military investigator who drifts around the country, finding murder and mayhem in the small dots on the map, and Paramount Plus’s “Joe Pickett,” based on C.J. Box’s series about a Wyoming game warden.
Part of what’s so fun about these series is how different the lead characters are: While Jack Reacher enters and leaves nearly every situation as its master, Joe Pickett is as likely as not to get his gun taken away from him by some lawbreaker. Pickett is us, and Reacher is who we wish we were.
Unfortunately, Paramount Plus recently announced that “Joe Pickett” had been canceled after two seasons, robbing us of further on-screen adventures of Pickett, his family, and his allies and adversaries.
“Reacher,” on the other hand, returned with a second season of episodes in December — outliving, for now, the industry trend of streaming services canceling well-liked series, which affected not only “Joe Pickett” but also “Jack Ryan” and “Longmire,” another rural crime series adapted from a popular series of novels.
Riding the Range
A few thoughts about “Longmire,” to set the stage: It’s startling to realize that the adaptation of Craig Johnson’s books about Walt Longmire, longtime sheriff of Absaroka County, Wyoming, debuted on the cable network A&E in 2012, eight years after Johnson’s first novel in the series, “The Cold Dish,” was published.
“Longmire” was, before long, being touted as A&E’s top-rated series, proving there was an appetite for gritty rural crime stories. The network inexplicably decided in 2014 it would end the series after three seasons. It was picked up by Netflix and the streaming service continued it for seasons four through six before canceling it in 2017 (industry conventional wisdom is that networks and streaming services drop series before they have to pay higher production costs once contracts are renegotiated).
“Longmire” still draws an audience today. Johnson has published nearly 20 novels, collections, and short stories — and according to a Facebook page devoted to Johnson and his sheriff character, there’s ongoing cross-pollination between the books and the TV series. The novel’s readers tend to be more aware of the series than the viewers are of the books, the latter sometimes expressing surprise that the books even exist. Either way, the sheriff has devoted fans, as an annual “Longmire Days” festival in Wyoming is well-attended.
The title character is, in both the books and series, aging out of his job patrolling hundreds of square miles of territory, where something illegal — humorous, deadly serious, or just deadly — is always happening. There’s a tremendous undercurrent of quirky humor in the books and series.
“Longmire” the TV series is now long gone, but it will absolutely scratch your itch for peace officers ranging across a lonely countryside, traveling from Native reservations and small-town courthouse squares to the palaces of the Western rich and the hardscrabble homes of the poor.
There’s not as much humor to be found in “Joe Pickett,” unless you get your jollies from the protagonist’s existential crisis.
Everyman
Author C.J. Box has written more than 30 novels, 24 of them about Joe Pickett. It was natural that Paramount Plus would want a series about Pickett and his world. The ABC series “Big Sky” was drawn from another of Box’s book series featuring Cassie Dewell and Cody Hoyt.
It’s likely some viewers found the relationships on “Joe Pickett” the best part about the show. The cast is led by Michael Dorman, so memorable as astronaut Gordo Stevens in the science fiction/alternate history series “For All Mankind.” As Pickett, Dorman — handsome and instantly likable but not a brawny brawler — is believable not only as an honorable man and dedicated game warden in remote Wyoming but also as a man haunted by his past, particularly the abuse he, his brother, and their mother suffered when he was a child. Julianna Guill is very good and quite convincing as Marybeth Pickett, Joe’s wife and an experienced attorney.
“Joe Pickett” was another one of those series, like “Yellowstone,” just as appealing to watch for the vistas as for the storylines. Although set in Wyoming, the series was mostly filmed in Alberta, Canada.
The cancellation of “Joe Pickett” is perplexing. Maybe some post-mortem will tell us if audiences — or executives, for that matter — just couldn’t connect with the hero, the stories, or the setting.
An interesting comparison will come at some point as we see if “Reacher” lives past its second season, which began streaming in December.
Within Reach
It’s easy to say that “Reacher” is an example of brawn over brains, but anyone who’s read author Lee Child’s books — soon to be continued by his brother, Andrew — knows that Reacher, although he’s a deadly, ex-military investigator, has savant-like qualities; he can puzzle out almost anything, like offensive strategy, and he has an internal clock that is always accurate, to the minute. He loves numbers and solving real-life puzzles almost as much as he enjoys wading into a fight against several opponents. The bad guys occasionally isolate or overpower Reacher, but he can always figure out how to get the upper hand.
There was scoffing when Tom Cruise was cast as Reacher — who is described as six-foot-five — for two films. But the casting of Alan Ritchson as the title character for the 2022 series was widely hailed. Ritchson is the right height and build, for one thing, but he has the right demeanor: Reacher minds his own business as he travels around the country, taking buses and hitchhiking backroads, carrying no suitcase and little more than some cash, his passport, and a toothbrush. Ritchson embodies the loner who just wants a change of landscape but inevitably gets pulled into a mystery.
It’s funny to imagine a story about the ultra-capable warrior in which he walks into a small town and isn’t immediately drawn into some murderous drama. In the first episode of the first season, he’s just sitting down to eat a piece of peach pie at a diner in town when he’s arrested and charged with murder. He didn’t do it, of course, but he works with local allies to get to the bottom of it.
The Child brothers — who have cowritten four books now in the run-up to the younger brother taking over the novels — do very well in demonstrating Reacher’s dogged nature. He’s honorable and honest and inclined to efficiently eliminate bad guys who would hurt innocent bystanders. For Reacher, the war didn’t end but it did shift to America’s rural landscape.
Reacher is currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video. Joe Pickett is streaming on Paramount Plus.
Keith Roysdon is a Tennessee-based writer. His fourth co-written true crime book, “Cold Case Muncie,” about murders without justice in what’s long been considered the typical small American city, was published by the History Press in August. He’s a writer of news, pop culture, and fiction.
This article first appeared in The Good, the Bad, and the Elegy, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder focused on the best, and worst, in rural media, entertainment, and culture. Every other Thursday, it features reviews, recommendations, retrospectives, and more. Join the mailing list today to have future editions delivered straight to your inbox.
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