‘Sheriff Country’ Showrunner Teases Romance, Wild Cameos, and Mickey’s Mysterious Father md11

The Fire Country universe has officially expanded with the CBS series Sheriff Country, following sheriff Mickey Fox (Morena Baccarin), the stepsister of Cal Fire’s division chief Sharon Leone (Diane Farr), as she navigates a complicated relationship with her ex-con marijuana-grower father Wes (W. Earl Brown) while he tries to go legit. Clashing with her daughter Skye (Amanda Arcuri), who is trying to make better choices that will stop getting her in trouble, Mickey has a lot to juggle in a town that is already quick to judge someone they know so much about.

During this one-on-one interview with Collider, showrunner Matt Lopez discussed what makes Mickey Fox such an exciting character to center a series around, all the layers that Baccarin brings to the role, sharing a common DNA with Fire Country while becoming its own thing, what Brown and his “pirate” character bring to the series, Edgewater crossovers, the complicated Mickey-Cassidy (Michele Weaver) friendship, being toward between being a sheriff and being a mother when it comes to her daughter, and what he’s most enjoyed about how this ensemble is coming together.

Showrunner Matt Lopez Loves the Duality of Mickey Fox in ‘Sheriff Country’

“She is a person who puts up some armor, but she cares so deeply about her town.”

Collider: What drew you to this world and what do you love about a character like Mickey at the center of it?

MATT LOPEZ: What drew me to it is Mickey and how rich and nuanced and complex that character is. We’ve all seen more than our fair share of investigative dramas, police procedurals, or whatever you want to call it. This character did exist because she was introduced in Fire Country Season 2 and just captivated me. Morena got hired right around when they approached me. It was like, “Oh, and by the way, we’re talking to Morena Baccarin about this.” I actually did an ABC pilot with Morena’s husband, Ben McKenzie, and I’d gotten to know her. I’ve always been such a huge fan of hers. That was just the cherry on top because I knew what she could bring.

What she brings is what attracted me to the show, which is this incredible duality. She’s this woman who, on the one hand, is this extremely strong law enforcement officer, but on the other hand, she has this amazing human touch and a vulnerability. That’s not to say that she wears her heart on her sleeve. She is a person who puts up some armor, but she cares so deeply about her town. And then, you throw in this other additional wrinkle, which I loved about the storytelling, and we explore it all season long, which is the fact that she is Wes Fox’s daughter. She has this father who has this pirate’s charm with a roguish personality that you just love. But at the same time, he is a career criminal. He’s allegedly going straight. What does it say about a person who has that father? Why does that person become a sheriff? And then, you have her daughter, Skye, who is very much Mickey’s daughter, but is also Wes’ granddaughter. She is very much a Fox, with both aspects of that.

I also loved the idea, which I think the show delivers and makes very exciting, that it’s a show that very much plays in the waters that Fire Country does, in terms of this very common DNA that they share, with the small town vibes, the spirit of community, a certain spirit of hopelessness, and themes of redemption and community that come again and again. At the same time, Sheriff Country has afforded us an opportunity, like the most successful spinoffs or second chapters, to find our own identity. That’s very much something that excited me, the idea of taking viewers of Fire Country to some corners of Edgewater that they’ve never seen before and playing in some waters that are maybe a little more treacherous and dangerous, in terms of the town.

In episode two, we introduced this idea of Deadwater. Mickey grew up there, which is really interesting. She’s a child of Deadwater, and to call it the other side of the tracks is an understatement. So, there’s this gray area of really rich stuff with a character who, at the end of the day, is going to do the right thing. It may be complicated, and it may be painful, but she does have this great sense of right and wrong. All the ingredients were there. I read that pilot, so memorably created by Tony [Phelan], Joan [Rater] and Max [Thieriot], and I was like, “This is a show that can go for a long time.”

You have all these layers of the story and all these complications for the characters. What made you decide to complicate things even further by bees and beehives?

LOPEZ: Yeah. Wes is great, and he’s portrayed so indelibly by W. Earl Brown. He’s an actor I’ve followed forever. Sometimes an actor and a role meet. Earl may not be a household name yet. For people who really are into TV, he is, but to a much wider audience, he is about to become a thing. The word we use for Wes in the writers’ room, more often than any other, is pirate. He’s a pirate, and like a pirate, you never know from one moment to the next what he’s going to do. Will he tip toward the light or toward the darkness? Whichever one he does, it’s going to be charming as hell because that’s what he brings. It’s going to be funny because he brings a great element of comedy to the show. He is walking this razor’s edge. He made his daughter this promise that he would go legit. Whether he, in fact, will be able to honor that promise is something that is a great story that we’ll play in Season 1.

I thought it was so brilliant to have Wes step in when Skye was just not listening to the law side of things, as far as why she shouldn’t be with her boyfriend. She listened to the criminal side of things in a way that she wouldn’t listen to her mother.

LOPEZ: That’s such a great insight by you, of how that came about. I love that moment in the first episode where Mickey is talking about Brandon, the boyfriend, and says, “He’s a bad influence.” And Wes is like, “And you think I’m a good influence?” It’s not every day that you see real wisdom imparted, by means of luring your granddaughter’s boyfriend into stealing drug money out of your beehives, but it works. She does the right thing, in the end. Is it the parenting techniques you read about in magazines and on the internet? No, but it does work and it’s a delicious thing for the character.

As the Season of ‘Sheriff Country’ Progresses, You’ll See Less Expected Crossovers With ‘Fire Country’

“That’s the exciting thing about this town of Edgewater.”

You jumped right in with crossovers, having Max Thieriot bring Bode into the first episode. Did you intentionally want to bring him into things so early? Was it important to also give Bode someone he can talk to about addiction in a way that he can’t really, with most of the characters on his own show?

LOPEZ: It’s true. In Skye, he does have someone who is reliving struggles that he is intimately and unfortunately deeply acquainted with. In these early episodes, the Venn diagram of where the two shows overlap is very much centered in the Leone and Fox families that live at the core of this Edgewater universe. As we get deeper into the season, without giving anything away, what becomes very exciting is actually expanding from there, seeing some pairings between the two shows that might not be so obvious. We expect Bode and Mickey, but to see Boone cross with someone from Fire Country or Wes cross with someone from Fire Country that he’s not related to, that’s the exciting thing about this town of Edgewater and creating this quilt, if you will, between these two shows.

Even if your relationship with your ex is over, you don’t really want to be surprised by his new relationship when you knock on his door, especially when it’s someone you have to see every day at work. Why did that feel like the best way to break that to Mickey? What is that going to be like for them to navigate?

LOPEZ: The Mickey-Cassidy relationship is one of my favorites in the show. Cassidy tells us, in the first episode, how she met Mickey. Cassidy’s origin story as a deputy is directly related to Mickey, and we will unpack that in future episodes. It goes much deeper and is more emotional than your typical sheriff/deputy relationship. That only enhances how fraught it is, emotionally. There is a later episode coming up where Mickey will ask Travis, and she and Sharon talk about it in episode two, “Of all the women in town, why my deputy? And not just my deputy, but why my protégé?” Cassidy is almost like a little sister or niece to Mickey. They are deeply connected.

What you see at the end of episode one and continuing into episode two is Cassidy being like, “I’m going to do this.” That’s a real stand-up moment for Cassidy because it’s not easy for her, as we’ll see. It’s very hard for Cassidy to disappoint Mickey. In a weird way, Mickey is not happy about it, but she’s a little impressed with Cassidy. Mickey said, “I don’t want you to see him.” And at the end of the episode, Cassidy said, “I’m going to see him.” Now as we all know, it’s one thing to say and it’s another thing to see it in practice. That will be a little bit of an emotional minefield for them to navigate, but if they can come out the other side, they will come out stronger for it.

We see what Mickey goes through during a day as a sheriff, but then you also complicate things even further by having Skye’s boyfriend end up dead. How did you want to set that up to play out? Did you know the resolution of that when you came up with that idea?

LOPEZ: We put a lot of thought and effort into how that mystery unfurls in the writers’ room. That mystery will unfurl over the early course of the season. It’s not a season-long thing, with two asterisks. One is that the emotional ripple effects of Skye being implicated in her boyfriend’s murder will continue to permeate all season long. We are flicking a domino, and there are some other dominoes that will fall, that are quite dramatic and delicious. The second one, without giving anything away, is that it’s a show that will continue to surprise us and continue to have some really tantalizing and at times jaw-dropping twists and turns. I’m not saying we might resolve the mystery of who killed Brandon, and then later on, call into question whether what we thought we saw was exactly what we saw and whether we understood exactly what we thought we understood, but we might. It’s a delicious mystery.

As a viewer of television, I love shows that strike a tone where there are real stakes and real jeopardy, but there’s also heart and humor. Yes, we’re implicating Skye in her boyfriend’s murder in the first episode, which is pretty intense. But as you see in episode two, Mickey and Wes go up to Deadwater and she enlists her father’s aid to get her through these booby traps because he knows booby traps and he had this illegal growth for all these years. We are always finding ways to lean into the humor and the heart. It’s a show that has a lot of humor, maybe even more than Fire Country. We have sheriff’s deputy technical advisors and sometimes it’s the calls they get. We had a tech advisor colleague where a woman called in and said, “I want you to come arrest my husband.” “What did he do?” “He’s walking around the house like he thinks he’s all that.” She wanted him arrested for that. These everyday small town things, we have a lot of fun with.

It’s so interesting to see Mickey and Boone pitted against each other from the beginning of the series. No matter how that plays out, even if they can find some common ground again, is that a betrayal that you can’t ever really forget? Will that continue to affect the two of them?

LOPEZ: What you’re hitting on is some great story. Starting in episode three, we will unpack how they were partners. When you ride around every day for two years with someone, facing death, facing crazy shit, facing funny shit, you bond with them. Mickey and Boone were extremely close, and then what happened? She gets elevated to sheriff, and he gets passed over. That’s where we were when the show opened. Can they navigate that? Even as Boone is charged with investigating this murder in which Mickey’s daughter is implicated, can they get their relationship back to where it was? If the answer is yes, can they move beyond to another level of closeness and partnership? They are a dynamic duo. They really do complicate themselves.

We’ll learn that Boone is not an Edgewater guy. He was a sheriff’s deputy in Oakland, so he’s used to big city stuff. That affects his way of looking at the world, and his way of looking at crime and policing. He checks boxes that Mickey doesn’t have, and he can see things that she might have blind spots about. So, if they can figure out a way to restore what they had and possibly even move beyond it, they can be one of the all-time like, gold standard, Mulder and Scully kind of TV partnerships. That’s what we were really excited. When you throw two actors together that are going to be sharing a lot of screen time, you’re like, “Please let them have chemistry.” And I’m happy to say, from the moment they met, Matt Lauria and Morena Baccarin had charm and easy camaraderie where they’re finishing each other’s sentences. It’s really a fun relationship.

Showrunner Matt Lopez Promises That Sparks Will Fly Among the ‘Sheriff Country’ Characters

“We want to really dimensionalize these characters.”

What have you most enjoyed about this ensemble?

LOPEZ: It’s a great ensemble and a true ensemble. It’s called Sheriff Country. Mickey’s the sheriff. She’s the closest thing to our Bode. Fire Country would not be Fire Country without Sharon, Manny, and Eve. We are really enjoying, through these early episodes, taking a beat to dig into Cassidy and dig into Gina, Mickey’s assistant who shares a romantic history with Wes and is the institutional memory of the sheriff’s office. We want to really dimensionalize these characters. It’s a cat’s cradle of relationships. Pairing off Skye with Gina, or Travis with Boone, or Travis with Wes, that’s his former father-in-law, so what’s that history about?

We’ll unpack the Fraley family, which is basically the wealthiest family in town. The Mickey-Travis relationship was two people falling in love from opposite sides of the tracks. How do the ripple effects of that continue to play to this day? Her relationship with Travis is one we’re really excited about because their daughter being implicated in this murder will throw Mickey and Travis back into each other’s lives in a way they really haven’t been since they were married. We’ll see sparks of all kinds fly. There are sparks of, “I just remembered what I can’t stand about you and why I filed for divorce.” There are also sparks of, “Oh, yeah, that was amazing about you. I almost forgot about that.” So, that will be a great relationship as well.