Blood platelet donation takes about two hours. With a needle in both arms, you can’t read a book, so the Red Cross came up with a brilliant solution – donors can watch Netflix as the platelet machine whirs. Last summer a nurse in a hijab prepared me for donation while I perused the Netflix offerings. When it came time to place the needles, I still hadn’t decided. “Ah”, she said, “That’s the trouble with Netflix – no one can decide what to watch. Here’s a show about a sheriff. He has a Native American friend that he’s known since childhood – you might like it.” With that, she started the first episode of “Longmire”, a show I’d never watched. I was about to protest that I hated crime shows, I disliked Westerns, and I preferred movies over TV shows. As I was not the only donor this busy nurse needed to take care of, I decided that I’d watch an episode or two of this show even though I hadn’t chosen it. I watched the first episode, and most of the second, until the machine dinged and my donation was complete.
Back at home I turned on Netflix and finished the second episode. Over the days and weeks that followed, I stuck with the series. Walt Longmire (Robert Taylor) is your basic laconic Harrison Ford type, sheriff of the fictional county of Absaroka Wyoming. His best friend is Henry Standing Bear (Lou Diamond Phillips), owner of the local watering hole.
I stared to really get into the show – there’s tension between Walt’s office and Mathias (Zahn McClarnon), the sheriff on the local Cheyenne reservation. Mathias has a bee in his bonnet ’cause Walt sent his old boss Malachi (Graham Greene!) to prison for corruption. Walt is not one to bend the rules unless it’s absolutely convenient, but in time the two develop a grudging respect. But wait, there’s more! Jacob Night Horse (A. Martinez) wants to build a casino, a move that Walt’s late wife opposed. If that wasn’t enough, one of Longmire’s deputies, Branch Connally (Bailey Chase), is running against him for sheriff. Walt’s other deputies are Victoria Moretti (Katee Sackhoff), who has come to Wyoming to escape her past in Philadelphia and Archie (the Ferg) Ferguson (Adam Bartley), a hapless chap that Walt hired as a favor to the Ferg’s father.
OK, I watched the show and all, but there were elements that bugged me – as the series went on I was never comfortable with the not-so-subtextual sexual tension between Deputy Moretti and Longmire. This seemed particularly creepy in light of the fact that Longmire’s daughter Cady (Cassidy Freeman) is approximately the same age as Moretti and because of the boss/employee dynamics involved. Yes, I’ve read that this tension plays out in Craig Johnson’s novels upon which the series is based, but that doesn’t make it any less creepy.
Cut the creepy stuff, willya?
On the positive side, I liked the episodes where Lou Diamond Philips became a Zorro-like character and the ones where Graham Greene figured prominently. The latter makes a really good bad guy. At times, the show contains elements of magical realism, as in the works Gabriel García Márquez.
You’re a heckuva bad guy, Graham!
If you decide to watch the series, avoid the last episode like the plague (or at least the part after all the gun-fightin’.) In my humble opinion, the final episode makes the unwise decision to tie up all the story lines into one big happy ending. I wanted to gag.
All in all, Longmire is a mixed bag – the show seldom achieves greatness, but it frequently achieves pretty-goodness.
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