Mountain noir and a reprobate hero in the TV adaptation of Joe Pickett

Novelist CJ Box’s Joe Pickett finds new life on the screen as a lone-wolf game warden trying to maintain his integrity.

Michael Dorman in Joe Pickett.

I’ve just caught up with Joe Pickett, the Paramount+ series that arrived somewhat unheralded and a little unloved and with almost no international promotion or critical attention. This is surprising as the books on which the series is based are from the great C. J. Box, all international bestsellers, with millions sold, and now translated in about 30 languages.

The first season is based on the novels Open Season and Winterkill, both a mix of police procedural and mountain noir with an edge of contemporary western. These are the novels that introduced the knockabout Joe Pickett, known as “the game warden who does no wrong”, a lone wolf law enforcement officer dedicated to the Wyoming wilderness in which he operates.

He battles “environmental terrorists, rogue federal land managers, animal mutilators, crazed cowboy hitmen, corrupt bureaucrats, homicidal animal rights advocates and violent dysfunctional families,” according to Box. Though he’s not particularly good with guns, and as Box says, he “doesn’t enter every fight with an agenda other than to do the right thing”.

He spends most of his time driving and patrolling the timbered slopes of the Twelve Sleep River Valley, and his home town is Saddlestring. There he lives with his young family in what he calls, with no real self-consciousness, “the House of Feelings”, his fly rod strung and ready near the front door.

The problems and challenges Pickett faces in his personal life give him an emotional grounding and a personal depth that separates him from so many reprobate heroes in crime fiction, even as he continually finds himself thrust into deadly conspiracies that threaten his family.

And as in the classic Western formula, while Pickett invariably succeeds in purging the evil and lawless forces surrounding him and establishes an ideal, if often troubled, relationship with his family, there’s always a sense that this happy resolution can’t be spread to society as a whole.

Box wrote The Highway, which ABC, the flagship production property of Disney Television, has adapted into the series Big Sky. He is also an executive producer on Joe Pickett. Suddenly, CJ Box is everywhere in TV land.

One of the most successful and original crime novelists around, Box has picked up many accolades at the Edgar Allan Poe Awards, Anthony Awards, Prix Calibre 38 (France), the Maltese Falcon Award (Japan), the Macavity Award and the Gumshoe Award.

Box has made the contemporary Western his own – he calls it his “witches’ brew of Old West and New West” – bringing to the genre an atmospheric volatility that never ceases to thrill. This is something the series, while filmed in Calgary rather than Pickett’s Wyoming, gets cinematically just right with some lovely old-fashioned scenic values which are romantic and adventurous. The production opted to shoot in Canada’s snowy wilderness for budgetary reasons, mainly within the province of Alberta, and of course there are Canada’s tax incentives and low exchange rates.

As atypical as Pickett is of crime genre protagonists, so too is C. J. Box unlike many other crime writers, in that he directly confronts the problems of the American wilderness, not only the drug runners and people smugglers, but animal cruelty and the way humans have played a devastating role in ruining natural resources. The ongoing conflict between environmentalists and developers is central to his many plots - and to this first series.

There are now more than 30 Box novels. Twenty-two of these feature Pickett, his wife MaryBeth and their family; they are the central figures in the new TV series which was produced by Spectrum Originals, an offshoot of Charter, the second largest cable and internet operator in the US.

Brothers John and Drew Dowdle are the creators, writers, directors, showrunners and executive producers of the series. The brothers made their name with small-budget horror flicks and thrillers almost a decade ago, but more recently created the Paramount series Waco, which covered the infamous 1993 misguided raid on the ranch of David Koresh, the leader of the Branch Davidian religious community.

A cultish presentation for Paramount, it found a much larger audience when picked up by Netflix and was soon the No.2 show on the streamer. It was a horrifying true tale of a bloodbath, a siege and the fire that destroyed many lives, and fitted perfectly into Netflix’s concept of “prestige TV”.

Joe Pickett is very different, although it’s also full of twists, conspiracies, moral lapses and moments of cruel violence and gross impulsivity. Each novel’s ending, like the first series, erupts with credible, violent set pieces that genuinely surprise each time.

The first episode, “Monster At The Gate”, is a nicely packed introduction to Pickett’s world. As the snow falls and the mountains loom over his shoulders, Pickett is on patrol. He is inspecting a fence that’s been torn down by an elk when he encounters Ote Keeley (Benjamin Hollingsworth) hunting out of season. There is a tussle and Joe momentarily loses his gun to the poacher, an incident that gains some notoriety in the Saddlestring community and has a lasting effect on the game warden.

Keeley is later found dead by Joe’s daughter at the woodpile behind the Pickett house, next to a mysterious cooler that contains pellets of some unknown excrement, setting up an endangered species issue that becomes a major plot point. This in turn points to a larger conspiracy involving the former game warden Vern Dunnegan (David Alan Grier).

“We fell in love with C. J. Box’s Joe Pickett novels because of their nuanced take on morality in a morally ambiguous world,” the Dowdle brothers said in a promotion. “We became fascinated with Joe’s obsession with the ideas of truth, fairness and the order of things, and perhaps even more fascinated with the trauma that made him that way. These days, there is so much to relate to in the Pickett family’s desire for a simpler life, and also in the notion that unresolved elements of our past tend to follow us wherever we go. Spending the last few years with the Pickett family has been one of the great joys of our careers, and we couldn’t be more excited to bring them to life on screen.”

Pickett is played by the little-known – to me at least – New Zealand actor Michael Dorman, best known for starring roles as NASA astronaut Gordo Stevens in the Apple TV+ space drama series, For All Mankind, and as John Tavner in the comedy-drama series Patriot. And he’s just right as the everyman warden, resourceful but always careful, never threatening but always thoughtful, and with a nice insouciance, a quizzicality, about him.

And he naturally gets just right the way that Pickett, as a character, explores the value conflicts between the traditional ways of wilderness life, the inevitability of progress, and the legal process. In the novels he’s only ever described as “lean and of medium height” but Dorman, understated and naturalistic in style, convinces as a kind of western archetype in his strong desire to maintain his own personal integrity and the purity of his warden’s code.

Julianna Guill, a solid, believable naturalistic actor, is Pickett’s lawyer-turned-stay-at-home wife, Marybeth, and is never far from the action. She is also handy with a shotgun. Guill seems to have done a great deal of screen work, starring in shows and films as diverse as Crazy, Stupid, Love, The Apparition, Community and Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce.

She brings charm and a sturdy steadfastness to Marybeth, probably the smartest person in all of Saddlestring. She lovingly appreciates Joe despite his flaws, and in the first episode discovers she is pregnant with her third child, just as she is about to go back to work.

NYPD Blue icon Sharon Lawrence plays Marybeth’s mother, Missy. In that gritty, groundbreaking cop show Lawrence played assistant district attorney Sylvia Costas, a tough-as-nails prosecutor and a romantic foil to series lead Dennis Franz. She’s been busy since with roles in Law & Order: SVU, Judging Amy, Desperate Housewives, Grey’s Anatomy (earning an Emmy nomination for playing Izzy Stevens’s mother) and Curb Your Enthusiasm.

She is brilliant as Missy, flirtatiously raising the temperature of every room she enters. She is a bit of a lush who, suddenly penniless and without a partner, finds herself sleeping on the Picketts’ couch.

A woman of high standards fallen on hard times, she uses men to improve her position in the world – a recurring plot twist through each novel. She doesn’t think Pickett is worthy of her daughter, something she makes clear.

The other central character is Nate Romanowski, played impressively by Mustafa Speaks, who, in the first episode, joins Pickett and eventually becomes a kind of partner-in-arms to the main character throughout the entire series. He’s a mysterious kind of outlaw-falconer, a rugged mountain man with a black ops past.

I’ve enjoyed Box’s Pickett novels for years and the Dowdle brothers do a great job in recreating the enjoyment of reading them for the screen. They manage to achieve just the right texture, that certain density between the characters and the sense that place is fate. And in Dorman they find the perfect Joe Pickett.

Joe Pickett is streaming on Paramount +