Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Joe Pickett’ Season 2 on Paramount+, A Neo-Western With Murder Mystery Rhythms And A Little Bit Of ‘Yellowstone’ DNA

In Joe Pickett, which returns to Paramount+ for its second season, a fish and game warden and his family in a small Wyoming town keep finding themselves at the center of murders, schemes, and mayhem of both the human and animal kind. Creators and showrunners John Erick Dowdle and Drew Dowdle adapted Pickett from the series of bestselling novels by CJ Box, who also wrote the source material for the David E. Kelley’s crime thriller series Big Sky; Michael Dorman (For All Mankind, Patriot) as Joe is joined by Julianna Guill (The Resident), Sharon Lawrence, and Mustafa Speaks. So what’s the latest from sleepy Saddlestring and the county of Twelve Sleep? Well for one thing, there are more murders for Joe to solve. 

JOE PICKETT — SEASON 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

Opening Shot: A mountain range looms over an expanse of wilderness. Someone’s out here hunting, but it isn’t an elk in their rifle sights. Their quarry walks upright.

The Gist: Last season on Joe Pickett, the fish and game warden based in the little mountain town of Saddlestring, Wyoming got caught up in the murder of a local poacher, a grisly crime that turned out to be just one piece of a much bigger and dirtier mess that eventually led to Joe (Dorman) shooting Vern Dunnegan (David Alan Grier), the cagey old warden he replaced, and killing his friend and colleague Wacey Hedeman (Paul Sparks) after Wacey was revealed to not only be the stalker of Joe’s daughter Sheridan (Skywalker Hughes), but also the man who shot his pregnant wife Marybeth (Gill), an awful moment that led to their loss of the baby. So if you thought this show was just going to be about an easygoing but troubled guy whose job involves wrangling the occasionally unruly emu and ticketing the governor of Wyoming for fishing without a license, well, there’s a little bit more than that going on around these parts. On Joe Pickett, the majestic mountains that frame the action hold plenty of secrets, and it seems like there are always people who will kill to control the region’s wealth of natural resources.

Season two begins a year after the attack on Joe’s family. The game warden’s got a new trainee, a talkative zillennial named Luke Brueggerman (Keean Johnson), Vern’s in prison for his role in a scheme involving a rich local family and, of all things, a species of weasel that was thought to be extinct, and Marybeth is having trouble concentrating on her work as an attorney due to lasting trauma from the loss of their unborn son. There is fallout for their daughters, too, Sheridan and Lucy (Kamryn Pliva), and April (Vivienne Guynn), the girl the Picketts have taken in, who are being bullied at school. And Missy (Lawrence), Marybeth’s alcoholic and untrustworthy mother, is dating McLanahan (Chad Rook), a dufus local sheriff’s deputy who caused Joe no end of frustration in season one. Actually, Missy and the deputy both caused Joe and Marybeth no end of trouble last season, so they’re kind of made for each other.

When Joe saddles his horse and heads into the mountains to search for a local hunter who is believed to be missing, he has a threatening encounter with Camish Grimmengruber (Alex Breaux) and his twin brother, two men living away from society who have little patience for Joe’s attempts to ticket them for illegal fishing. And while as a game warden he’s accustomed to operating in wild places with little to no backup, things get dicey for Joe when he and his horse fall within bow and arrow range of an unknown attacker.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The neo-Western Longmire vibes are strong with Joe Pickett, and there are parallels to Yellowstone in both its setting and themes involving the various battles for control of Wyoming’s rich vein of natural resources.   

Our Take: Sure, Yellowstone is about family. But at the scale Tyler Sherdian’s hit drama is working at, it’s often more about greed, retribution, and the bad things people do to get what they want. Joe Pickett is purposefully smaller than all of that. While the two shows share a western state as their setting and an affinity for the region’s spectacular scenery, not to mention their share of people operating in bad faith, Pickett always keeps the loving relationship of its title character and his wife front and center, and consistently includes the couple’s young daughters in the action. And that really raises the stakes whenever death and destruction shatters the idyll of the town of Saddlestring, since the Picketts so often are either the target of it or instrumental in trying to stop it. All of them, not just Joe as the game warden. The show’s second season has already put an emphasis on Joe and Marybeth’s oldest daughter Sheridan, and how she’s navigating the trauma of what befell the family last time around, and it’ll be interesting to watch it build on that family dynamic, especially since Joe’s work has once again plunged him into peril.

But what about the drunk elk? Yep, the compelling murder mystery side of Joe Pickett is consistently tempered with stories of animals behaving badly, like those massive members of the deer family getting boozed up on crushed apples, destroying public property, and hoofing it into the Pickett girls’ elementary school hallways. The animal storylines give Michael Dorman an opportunity to show off the functional side of his character, while all of the bloodshed Joe finds himself involved with allows Dorman to express the warden’s troubled inner life as a person still processing the violence that scarred his childhood. (Dorman does a lot of this with only his eyes and features – he plays Joe convincingly as a guy who remains unsure about how to share his emotions with the world.) Joe Pickett has settled into a nice niche. Its rhythms are of the Western and murder mystery variety, but its heart is with the love and experience that unties a family.  

Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode.

Parting Shot: Joe’s in a tough spot. He had referred to this rough and tumble area outside of town as “Bermuda Mountain,” as in Triangle, because of its nonexistent cell service and a rogue magnetic field that screws with compasses. Now he’s about to find out if a game warden on a mountainside can be lost at sea.

Sleeper Star: We’re all looking forward to the return of Mustafa Speaks, who wowed in Joe Pickett season one as Nate Romanowski, an ex-military survivalist and falconer with a shadowy past who went from being Joe’s prime suspect in the murder of a local poacher to becoming a trusted ally of he and Marybeth. 

Most Pilot-y Line: Marybeth takes hold of her husband’s lapels as he prepares to ascend again into the wilderness. “Be careful,” she says, and he gives her one of his sideways grins. “I know. That’s my middle name. Joe ‘Careful’ Pickett.” Marybeth just shakes her head, because while he certainly is careful, she knows more than most how trouble just has a way of finding Joe Pickett.

Our Call: STREAM IT. A winning chemistry between all of the members of the family thrives at the center of Joe Pickett, a neo-Western with its own take on the various troubles that weave their way into the mountains and grand vistas of Wyoming. 

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges