Longmire on TV

I’ve been enjoying A&E’s new crime drama TV series Longmire, about the trials and tribulations of a Wyoming county sheriff.  Like so many such series, and movies as well for that matter, a big part of the appeal is the stimulant to the imagination, about life is such a place at such a time.  Sometimes the story lines can be secondary to what’s running through one’s mind eye.   

The writing and acting are generally pretty good, and I’m glad I took a flyer although I should say that I abandoned one episode (I later relented) because of head-shaking remarkable coincidences and excessive intertwining of the lives of the small number of major characters that so often fill TV series.   

For my tastes, it’s hard to find a good series, with historical or geographic or scientific interest, that strikes an acceptable balance, for me, between main plot versus character backstories and subplots – I prefer when the latter is kept in check.  Sometimes a good series deteriorates into mostly character stories, like CSI (which I stopped watching a few years ago) and the third season of Deadwood.  Even American Restoration, an interesting reality TV show about a Las Vegas restorer of artifacts, antiques, and old objects, has been reducing the technical restoration-related content in favor of the personal inter-relationships among the characters; not a good development.

John M Greco