The television show “Longmire” just keeps surprising Wyoming’s New York Times best-selling author Craig Johnson, who wrote the popular “Longmire Mysteries,” the books the television series is based on.
Every time he thinks the show has run out of chances for a revival, some new twist or turn happens to renew not only his hope, but the hopes of millions of loyal fans who have long been clamoring for more “Longmire” episodes.
The show was immensely popular and attracted millions of viewers every night when A&E canceled it after three seasons. The same was true for Netflix when it canceled the show after three more seasons.
In both cases, what caused the cancellations was that Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns the show’s intellectual rights, refused to sell the intellectual rights for the profitable program to anyone else.
Now, however, Netflix has a bid on the table to buy Warner Bros. outright, which would finally give Netflix the rights to the show it had sought to buy 10 years ago.
Paramount also has a bid in for Warner Bros., seeking to upstage Netflix.
So far, it seems that the Warner Bros. board still prefers the Netflix offer, with its president, Samuel A. Di Piazza Jr., reiterating his company’s support for the Netflix bid and recommending that the company reject Paramount’s revised offer.
“As far as I can tell, that deal looks like it has kind of gone through,” Johnson said. “So, if Netflix is in possession of all Warner Bros. shows, then that would mean ‘Longmire’ now does belong to Netflix, which was just what they wanted 10 years ago.”
Hit Surprise
Johnson is hopeful a Netflix purchase would mean eventual revival of the show.
“I can’t help but think that it would be kind of foolish if Netflix, after all these maneuverings, didn’t try to bring back a show that they already tried to (buy), which was a very popular show years ago.”
The show’s breakout popularity was somewhat of a surprise to everyone at the time, Johnson added.
“A lot of people don’t really know the mechanics of what happened to the show,” Johnson said. “The producing organization was Warner Bros. They were the studio that actually made the television show. And then what they do is they license it out to different broadcasters.”
The initial high bidder for the show was a surprise to Johnson, as well as a lot of industry insiders.
“I mean the Arts and Entertainment channel suddenly decided they were going to do a scripted Western like that?” Johnson said. "It was something new for them, and we had mixed feelings about it. We weren’t sure if this wouldn’t have been better suited for something like TNT or FX or something like that.”
The show, however, did phenomenally well for A&E.
“It was the highest-rated scripted drama of that network’s entire broadcasting history,” Johnson said. “It kind of blew us away. We were all very, very surprised by that, but it was pulling in close to 7, 8 million people a night. It was extraordinarily well-received like that. It was well enough received that they actually expanded the number of episodes to be done and that went on for like about three years. Three seasons.”
A PR Nightmare
The success prompted A&E to try and buy the intellectual rights for the show from Warner Bros., starting a chain of events that led to the first cancellation of “Longmire.”
“Warner Bros. was like, no big secret there, they just basically said, ‘Yeah, no, we’re not going to sell you the highest rated scripted drama that you’ve ever had,’” Johnson said. “That’s when A&E got into a snit and decided, ‘Well if you’re not going to sell it to us, we’re going to cancel it.’ And Warner Bros., they said, ‘Well, you can do that, but it’s going to look pretty silly that you’re canceling the highest-rated scripted drama that you’ve ever had in your network history.’”
A&E followed through on its threat though. Longmire had hit a wall.
“It was a PR nightmare for them,” Johnson said. “The response was incredible. People were very, very angry that the show had been canceled.”
Subsequent messaging from A&E, that the change had been to pursue a younger demographic, didn’t help their case, Johnson added.
“I don’t know much in life,” he said. “But I know enough not to piss off everyone over 50 years of age in the entire United States of America. And so, then it went even worse (for A&E). I mean, they lost like a third of their viewing audience, which I still think they’re trying to recoup from. All these people were fired, and all of this stuff happened.”
Netflix, Who?
After all of that happened, Johnson went up to meet with Warner Bros. CEO Peter Roth personally.
“He’s a great guy,” Johnson said. “He’s retired since then, but I went in to talk to him about the show and everything. And I said, ‘Peter, what are we going to do here? I mean, are we dead? I mean, come on, we were the highest-rated scripted drama they ever had.”
Roth told Johnson he was sure the show would get picked up by someone, probably a “streaming service.”
At that time, Johnson hadn’t really even heard that terminology before.
“You have to remember this was a number of years ago,” Johnson said. “So, I was like, ‘Well, what’s that?’ He said, “Well, it’s, you know, where you can watch movies and television on your phone and on your computer.’”
Johnson’s heart sank at the words.
“I was like, ‘Oh, that’s it. We’re dead. We’re never going to be heard from again.’”
But the streaming service that picked up “Longmire” was a scrappy little upstart that just so happened to be called Netflix. And the rest is history.
“It’s now the largest producing organization in Los Angeles,” Johnson said, chuckling a little bit. “We were the first, I guess, salvage operation for Netflix.”
Fans Still Haven’t Stopped Watching ‘Longmire'
“Longmire” did exceptionally well for Netflix, surprising both Johnson and the streaming service itself.
It went so well that Netflix, like A&E before it, tried to buy the intellectual rights for the show.
And got the same predictable answer from Warner Bros.
“Netflix was a little more gracious about it than A&E had been,” Johnson said. “They basically said, well, we’re going to stop after three seasons. And that will be the end of our relationship with Longmire.”
But even after the show stopped producing episodes, fans wouldn’t stop watching it. The show kept landing in various Top 10 categories on Netflix.
“It ran for almost eight more years,” Johnson said. “And I think what happened there was Netflix had a sweetheart deal with Warner Bros. It was an elongated deal where they could keep broadcasting the show.”
When the contract finally ran out, the show was picked up by Paramount+, where it has just continued to attract new eyeballs.
Part of that is just the rising popularity of Western shows in general. Longmire was at the vanguard of all that, Johnson said.
“We were kind of at the front curve of that, before all of the other nouveau modern Westerns really came into being,” Johnson said. “‘Longmire’ was kind of the first one. And we take a certain amount of responsibility for kind of breathing new life into Westerns like it.”
Time, Logistics Not Favorable
The longevity of “Longmire” is a big point in favor of a revival. Fans have clearly demonstrated they have an appetite for more of Absaroka County’s favorite sheriff, Walt Longmire, and his escapades.
Johnson has also produced a lot more novels in the "Longmire Mysteries" series, meaning there’s no shortage of new material to work with in the “Longmire” universe.
But intellectual property rights and new storylines aren’t the only consideration at work in whether there will be new episodes. Time and logistics have not been a friend to such an idea, “Longmire” actors Louanne Stephens and Robert Taylor told Cowboy State Daily during the annual Longmire Days festival in Buffalo last year.
Stephens plays Ruby, who is office manager for Absaroka County Sheriff Walt Longmire. Taylor plays Longmire.
Stephens and Taylor both indicated they’d be ready to reprise their roles for the popular show. But many of the cast’s other principals have already gone their own way. They have new long-term commitments or jobs that wouldn’t accommodate a lengthy project like a television series, no matter how much fans might be clamoring for it.
“I mean, I’m available,” Stephens said. “And (Taylor) did get them all to sign off that they’d do a movie. Not a series, but that they’d do a movie.”
A movie is a much more likely bet, Taylor said.
“It just takes the right producer at the right time to run all the numbers,” he said.
But time is no ally in that endeavor either, Stephens added.
“They know I’d want to do it,” Stephens said. “But they’ve got to hurry, before Ruby dies or something.”
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
