Because there is a God, the Louisiana Bayou knocked out New Jersey as the go-to locale for TV weirdos.
Without warning, big-haired orange trolls who never mastered indoor plumbing were replaced with wildmen who never saw indoor plumbing.
Now, it looks like the West is set to overtake both of those locations as the only place to film.
Personally, I welcome a land mass not bordered by water after all those wet seasons in hell.
As you know, the post-Civil War-era“Hatfields & McCoys” was the highest-rated mini-series in History’s, well, history. (OK, it was a southern-Western, not a Western-Western.)
Now, History’s parent network, A&E, is combining what was once the mother lode for them, mysteries, with what has turned into the new mother lode for them — the western.
Enter “Longmire,” a new series from the novels of Craig Johnson— a modern-day Western starring a guy with an old-time movie star’s name and a modern, old movie star’s voice.
That would be Robert Taylor, another Australian movie star who sounds more American than Madonna, as Sheriff Walt Longmire, an iconic, laconic Western male.
He walks slow, he talks slow, he acts fast.
Longmire is a miserable man on the first anniversary of his wife’s death.
In fact, he’s been so depressed for the past year that he hasn’t really been doing his job, which is to protect a Big Sky town that borders an Indian reservation.
Ironically, he is dragged back into the world of the living by a death —a murder, actually.
One morning, his deputy, Vic Moretti (Katee Sackoff), calls him to report a body on a mountain. She doesn’t tell him it’s the body of a sheep.
But then, further up the mountain, they find the body of a man who doesn’t belong around those parts — but who has been murdered with an antique rifle that used to be very popular around those parts.
On Longmire’s side is his best pal, barkeep Henry Standing Bear (the wondrous Lou Diamond Phillips), and working behind his back is Branch Connally (Bailey Chase), a deputy who has decided to run against him for Sheriff.
Both of these events get Longmire out of his ennui and back into the game.
However, the show is so slow-moving that you may find yourself fighting vainly the old ennui.
Damn! I always wanted to use that line somewhere.