TV GUIDE: On the Range With A&E's Hot Summer Hit Longmire
Jul 20, 2012
by Ileane Rudolph
... It's been a long time since TV was populated by righteous dudes of few words in cowboy hats. Timothy Olyphant's lawmen on Deadwood and Justified have a vengeful streak, and on Hatfields & McCoys you couldn't hit a hero with a Winchester if you tried. That's the hole Longmire executive producers Hunt Baldwin, John Coveny and Greer Shephard wanted to fill.
"After a long period of TV's most interesting characters being antiheroes, it seemed fresh to dig into an old-fashioned American hero," says Baldwin.
"One of the problems I've got with a lot of protagonists these days is that you can't really tell the good guys from the bad guys," adds Craig Johnson, whose popular Walt Longmire novels are the basis of the series. "People won't have that problem with Walt. He is a hero." Which means you can count on the Absaroka County, Wyoming, sheriff to always do the right thing. Isn't that refreshing?"
"We knew we were on to something really good," says Lou Diamond Phillips, who plays Walt's old friend Henry Standing Bear, a Cheyenne barkeep looking out for his tribe's interests. "The wild card was if the viewing public was ready for a contemporary Western."
It seems they were: 4.1 million viewers tuned in to Longmire's June 3 debut, making it the network's most watched scripted show ever. It's already been picked up for Season 2...
CLICK HERE TO VIEW LONGMIRE MARATHON SCHEDULE ON SUNDAY, JULY 29, 2012 ON A&E TV.
Longmire airs Sunday at 10/9C on A&E TV (and airs a new episode on Sunday, August 5, 2012.)
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