Sheriff Country has been a long time coming. The idea for the Fire Country spinoff was introduced during Season 2 in April 2024, when Morena Baccarin first appeared as Edgewater’s flinty interim sheriff Mickey Fox, stepsister of fire chief Sharon Leone (Diane Farr) and aunt of Bode Leone (Max Thieriot) — she actually arrested him for the robbery that sent him to prison.
Mickey showed up again in Season 3 in April 2025, bringing along her father, Wes Fox (W. Earl Brown), an illegal marijuana grower who’s an outlaw with a heart of gold. The two appearances established the character and her story. Now, Mickey’s finally ready to roll. Sheriff Country premieres Friday, Oct. 17 on CBS, alongside Fire Country Season 4. Baccarin tells Parade that the year and a half between when Sheriff Country was announced and when it premiered gave her a thorough understanding of the character and made her ready to hit the ground running.
“It was literally my third episode, so I was like, ‘I think I know she is now.’ I had training wheels, and I got to take them off,” she says. “But it was also a long process, longer than I’ve ever had to create any character. There’s sort of ups and downs of that. I was very anxious to get going. Having to think about it for so long was really anxiety-producing.”
Sheriff Country, from creators Joan Rater & Tony Phelan and Thieriot, follows Mickey as she faces tumult in her professional and personal lives. She’s running to become the permanent sheriff, but not everybody in town — or even in her own department — wants her to have that position. Her daughter Skye (Amanda Arcuri) is struggling with addiction, and she doesn’t think her ex-husband Travis (Christopher Gorham) is taking Skye’s sobriety seriously enough, so she asks Wes to come live with her and give his granddaughter some guidance she might need and only he can provide.
Mickey and Wes’s own relationship is strained, and living under one roof creates challenges and healing opportunities for them both. All the while, she faces crimes and emergencies that she is uniquely equipped to deal with as a native daughter of Edgewater who knows everyone and everything about the town.
How is Sheriff Country different from Fire Country?
Baccarin — an Emmy nominee for her work on Homeland in 2013 — says Mickey’s complexity drew her to the role.
“She’s such a great combination of all of my best and worst qualities as a person,” the actress says. “She hates being vulnerable. She’s really good at her job and loves what she does, but almost to a fault. You know, she has many blind spots, because she believes in the good of people and in the kind of community and society that she wants to live in. She is fiercely loyal, kind of a hard ass, but also has her Achilles heels. And so I felt like it was a character that you don’t see much on TV, which is like a strong yet vulnerable woman who has a commanding presence and is in charge.”
Sheriff Country feels a little like coming into something that’s already established, thanks to its Fire Country connection, while also feeling like its own thing that its makers are in the process of figuring out, Baccarin says. The importance of Edgewater is going to be one of the things that most distinguishes Sheriff Country from Fire Country. Fire Country created the town, but Sheriff Country will explore it a lot more.
“I think it’s going to be the town that people don’t live in — because it’s obviously made up — but want to live in, and they want to know the characters,” Baccarin says. “There are certain people that they’re going to be like, ‘Oh, there’s a troublemaker, or there’s my next-door neighbor that I love.’ It’s people they’re going to grow to know and love.”
The other big difference between Fire Country and Sheriff Country is that Sheriff Country has mysteries to be solved. As Baccarin puts it, if there’s arson, Bode and the firefighters put out the fire, and then Mickey figures out who set it and why — and that extends to every crime that happens in town. “So we’re solving crime, and there’s riddles and puzzles,” she says. “That aspect of law enforcement is, I think, going to be really fun for audiences to participate in.”
How Sheriff Country is like Fire Country
As for similarity, Sheriff Country will also blend its action with the soapy family drama that’s Fire Country’s specialty — and you can expect plenty of crossovers.
“Sometimes Fire Country characters will make appearances in Sheriff Country, and vice versa,” Baccarin says. The characters of Sheriff Country exist in the same world as those of Fire Country, which means they interact with each other and also have similar dynamics in their own families and workplaces. “We get to explore the camaraderie at the police station, and the familial relationships, and the characters that have ties to Bode and Sharon,” she says. “So it’s like, there’ll be like Easter eggs, and there’ll be things to look out for. But I think what people relate to the most are the character interactions, the soap aspect of the show in addition to the crime solving.”
Baccarin says that Sheriff Country has been one of the smoothest jobs she’s ever had, where it turned out to be exactly what she was expecting, but better. “I knew the character. I sort of knew the world a little bit. And then as Sheriff Country got developed more and more, it just extended what I sort of already thought I knew of it,” she says. “And if there’s anything that’s been surprising, it’s just how consistently great the scripts have been.”
She says that when a show is doing 20 episodes a season, it’s very hard to maintain a level of suspense and comedy and drama — while keeping it believable — that consistently meets the audience’s expectations. “And I have to say, every time I get a script, I’m like, I think audiences are gonna love it. I’m so amazed at how great they’ve been,” Baccarin says.
Sheriff Country premieres on CBS on Friday, Oct. 17 at 9/8c, after the Fire Country Season 4 premiere at 8/7c. Starting Oct. 24, Fire Country will air at its regular time Fridays at 9/8c and Sheriff Country will air Fridays at 8/7c. Episodes will be available to stream on Paramount+.
