Joe Pickett is a neat twist on the western
CJ Box’s crime novels about a game warden who cruises the Wyoming wilderness in his pick-up is rich fodder for television.
Joe Pickett has returned for a welcome second season, a surprise hit, and part of the TV western revival led to a large extent by Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone. There’s an interesting and eclectic group of new western shows such as Hugo Blick’s The English – and some recently, like Justified and Longmire – that reflect the conflict between differing views of America’s past and present.
Joe Pickett, produced by Paramount Television Studios, was originally released on US cable network Spectrum Originals, available exclusively to its video subscribers. It quickly became the top Spectrum Original ever, and when picked up by Paramount Joe Pickett was suddenly an international success, after receiving little promotion when it first started.
The crime novels on which it’s based are from the great C.J. Box; they are international bestsellers and now translated in about 30 languages. Box’s plainly written novels are contemporary westerns featuring game warden Joe Pickett and his loving family, played out against some spectacular Wyoming scenery.
The wilderness is the symbolic landscape in which Pickett works towards his confrontations with his many antagonists, a testing ground for character where self-preservation is the only law.
Patrolling Wyoming’s Twelve Sleep County and the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains in his green Ford F-140 pick-up, Pickett has a lot with which to contend. These days so much of the West is a kind of testing ground for the far right to try its ideologies; environmentalists want lawmakers to help build alternate industries to compensate for the inevitable demise of coal, an insidious drug problem has seeped into daily life left unchecked by officials, and the poaching of mule deer and pronghorn without licenses remains a problem.
John Eric and Drew Dowdle, aka “The Brothers Dowdle” are the creators, writers, and sometimes directors, showrunners, and executive producers of the series. They made their reputations with horror films like The Poughkeepsie Tapes and Quarantine and the action flick No Escape, gravitating, they say, “toward these movies where you’re hopefully not checking your iPhone in the theatre”.
But they hit the big time when Netflix picked up the Paramount series Waco, their six-part dramatisation of the tragic standoff by the FBI and ATF with the Branch Davidian religious sect at the compound of leader David Koresh, starring Michael Shannon and Taylor Kitsch.
Joe Pickett is far different in tone, with its high adventure mysteries set against a towering, majestic landscape, with nicely constructed suspense and surprising moral quandaries. (While the show is set in Wyoming, the first season was shot in Canada’s Calgary, the second around Okotoks, Alberta and High River, Alberta. The brothers say the Canadian mountains and prairies setting gives them a sense of being “even more Wyoming than Wyoming,” according to John Erick, with a “similar cowboy ethic.”)
Pickett is played with wonderful empathy by Michael Dorman, who gets the character’s slouching, careworn everyman quality just right, and his belief in nature as an elevating and uplifting moral force. And patrolling the timbered slopes in his red uniform under his olive-green uniform parka, a .40 Glock semi-automatic weapon on his belt, he lives with the deep understanding that he is part of a way of life that is under threat and becoming increasingly difficult.
His friends call him, with some affection, “Dudley-Do-Right” for his unrivalled ability to find himself in bad situations, but Pickett simply insists, “I’m a game warden, I swore an oath”.
Julianna Guill brings a sturdy stoicism to Pickett’s lawyer wife Marybeth, with patience and a kind of knowingness. She’s smarter than her husband and lovingly appreciative of his flaws and a devoted mother to their three girls, Sheridan, April and Lucy. Guill gets her relentlessness just right, too; she’s a woman who won’t rest until she gets to the bottom of stuff.
And NYPD Blue icon Sharon Lawrence returns as Marybeth’s mother, Missy, still raising the temperature of every room she enters. Described by Pickett as a “Barbie Doll in amber” in one of the novels, she has multiple marriages behind her and is practically ageless. She’s still no fan of the game warden and is eternally convinced her daughter married beneath her station. Maintaining a high quality in life is her constant quest, and Lawrence is simply delightful in the role, providing comic relief whenever she appears.
The other central character is Nate Romanowski, played impassively by Mustafa Speaks, a folk hero libertarian and outlaw falconer, a one-time special forces operator for the government, rarely without a shoulder holster carrying the huge .454 Casull revolver. He lives off-the-grid, nurturing his “air force” of specially bred and trained deadly falcons.
In the first episode he joined Pickett, eventually becoming not necessarily a sidekick to him but kind of a partner-in-arms throughout the entire series.
The new season is based on the novels Blood Trail, Nowhere to Run and Force of Nature and picks up a year after the events of the first. That story is centred on a natural gas company building an oil pipeline that would bring the company billions of dollars across Wyoming, through the mountains and forests of Twelve Sleep.
The parallel narrative involved the discovery of an endangered species, thought to be extinct, living in the Pickett’s woodpile that destroyed the future of the pipeline. It all resulted in a showdown that nearly wiped-out Joe’s family and resulted in him and Marybeth losing a pregnancy.
She’s still grieving as the new season unfolds, and Joe is stoically trying to manage emotionally, burying himself in work, handing out tickets for infringements to game, fish, trapping and boating laws and regulations, and responding to injured and nuisance wildlife calls. There’s a lovely scene early on when she joins Joe in a duet, a kind of family version of Cat Clyde and Jeremy Albino’s Been Worrying, as if to sing away their grief about losing their son.
The first episode, The Missing and the Dead, written by John Eric Dowdle and directed by Stephen Woolfenden (Rogue Heroes), starts deep in the forest where a sinister figure emerges from the trees carrying a heavy hunting rifle with a hi-tech sniper-style scope. Raising the weapon, he moves his sights from an animal to an unsuspecting hunter and with a single shot he fells him.
We find Pickett driving to pick up his new trainee Luke Brueeggeman, an amusing performance by Keean Johnson, a garrulous try-hard and know-all who from the start irritates Joe, a solemn man at the best of times. He warns the kid that, “the first rule of becoming a game warden is to get comfortable with silence”.
They visit an orchard which has been ravaged by a group of elk, drunk on fermented apples, one of whom causes chaos at a local school, a striking sequence that might belong in a Dowdle brothers’ horror movie. The elk eventually destroys Pickett’s truck, a running gag through Box’s novels. (In all his time with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, he holds the record for destruction of state property.)
Soon Pickett is persuaded by Marybeth to look for a missing hunter, husband to one of her clients, who has gone to an area locals call “Bermuda Mountain”, where many are said to have disappeared under mysterious circumstances.
And as he’s about to enter the woods on his trusty horse, Mercy, Pickett stumbles upon a hunter called Dave Farcus (Travis Friesen) who tells the game warden he was in the forest looking for an elk he had shot. But after tracking the animal he found it already mysteriously butchered and stripped by someone else.
Farcus is now drunk and terrified by what he has seen and warns Pickett of the fabled Wendigo, a malevolent legend among Native American tribes, historically associated with cannibalism, murder and insatiable greed.
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Undaunted, Pickett ploughs on and comes across a huge gaunt man fishing and biting the heads off the fish he catches. He’s Caleb Grimmengruber and Joe tickets him for fishing without a licence, enraging the frightening man. Pickett discovers he is one of a twin, known as the brothers Grimm, and they are as scary as any Wendigo, like monsters with some human characteristics. They are played by Caleb Ellsworth-Clark credited as “Grimm Performance Double” and it’s a terrific performance, too, with no doubt more to come as Pickett goes hunting them in later episodes.
It’s a dark, noirish episode with which to start the new season, directed with skill by Woolfenden. He develops a corrosive nihilism that appears to have infected many of Pickett’s antagonists in this second season. He’s not welcome in the town and is often referred to as “the lame warden”, who is both resented and disdained.
Pickett has a complex and ambiguous relationship with society; he is man-in-the-middle between groups that represent the old and the new West. As a game warden with a reputation for righteousness, he finds himself both involved with, and alienated from, the people around him.
Townsfolk respect him but he also annoys them by sticking to the rule of law, at times a lonely exile. Constantly he is, not always willingly, a kind of mediator between aggressive individualists representing the lawlessness of the old West and the new values of the settled town.
Joe Pickett streaming on Paramount +.