Longmire’s premiere introduces some compelling characters

Longmire stars Robert Taylor as Sheriff Longmire, a Wyoming lawman, who lost his grip on his job and his life after the death of his wife. Taylor has a rather soulful face and laconic speech (partly from flattening his normal Australian accent perhaps) but it works for this cowboy character. He’s not quite a man out of time — I’ve met men like him — but he is definitely a man at home in the slower, open spaces as we see in that first drive from his crumbling house and through his ranch land driveway to get to work.

New Mexico doubles for Wyoming, and the show makes good use of the land as an omnipresent force that’s bigger than the people in it. As a New Mexico native, I love the nostalgia of familiar vistas that the show invokes in me, even though I wish that it were actually set in New Mexico rather than being forced into a place it isn’t. It’s still photographed beautifully though, and (no offense Vancouver or Los Angeles), but it’s time for a new place. I’ve not read the Craig Johnson Longmire mysteries, but as this pilot represents them, they seem reminiscent of the mystery novels of Tony Hillerman, where the culture clash between whites and the various tribes of New Mexico is always a part of the story, even when the case has little to do with it overtly.

In the pilot we meet the main face of that cultural divide in Henry Standing Bear (Lou Diamond Phillips), who owns the local bar and retains ties to the nearby Cheyenne reservation, but who is also Longmire’s closest friend. Besides the help he offers for the case, I think the most interesting moment he plays is when he forgives Longmire’s assumption of his guilt lightly, but I had the distinct impression it was not forgotten. It’ll be interesting to see going forward if the moment has ramifications.

Katee Sackhoff plays a different sort of outsider. Victoria Moretti was a big city detective who has moved to Wyoming for reasons we don’t know yet. She is clever in how she gets Longmire out to the ‘crime scene’ rousing him with a tale of a victim, even when that victim is a sheep (before it turns into a human victim) and I enjoyed her hair dryer method of melting the ice. I want to find out more about Vic, especially why she’s in Wyoming and why she seems loyal and helpful to Longmire despite how he must have been very stricken when she came aboard. I suspect the answer may lie in Longmire’s daughter, played by Cassidy Freeman, seen briefly but with a sympathetic presence, but time will tell.

Deputy Branch Connally (who must have very cruel parents to give him the name of “Branch”) is an insider who is making himself into an outsider, as he chooses to run against Longmire as Sheriff. Longmire sees this as disloyalty, but Connally makes a good point that Longmire hadn’t been doing the job. We as the audience can tell Longmire’s back in it, but one successful case after a year of letting things slide, is probably too late for an ambitious younger man to step back again. I imagine the election will be a continuing thread to the season.

There’s been some comparison to Justified, and while there are some similarities, I don’t think they are that strong. The tone is different, for one thing. Justified is a modern noir, where the hero is barely more heroic than the bad guys he chases, but Longmire is a Western in which our hero is a bit crumbling and a bit out of time, but he’s definitely the hero. He picks up trash from the side of the road and drives five hours to tell a woman she’s been widowed, so I think we can safely say he’s in no danger of not doing the right thing or letting his anger get the best of him. If anything, Longmire’s closer to Sheriff Seth Bullock in Deadwood than Raylan Givens, if we want to compare a Timothy Olyphant character. Though all three lawmen would understand each other just fine.

I think what I like about this show the most, based on the pilot, is that they are trying to do a crime show in a different way. It’s not trying to subvert anything or make everyone an antihero, but it’s not a cookie-cutter procedural either. It won’t appeal to everyone, because it’s slowly paced, but it has room to grow and deepen in its own way. It plays fair with the audience, which I like in a mystery/crime show, and gives a promise of interesting characters in an interesting place.

What did everyone else think?  Are you coming back next week?

Clacked by Liz Tamura
on Jun 04, 2012 @ 08:24 EST5EDT