Absaroka County doesn't exist on Wyoming maps, but it has its own county-24 license plate. Craig Johnson has a stack to prove it.
One was affixed to each car in the A&E television pilot "Longmire," and Johnson couldn't resist taking a few home.
"If the TV show does get done, I'd really enjoy seeing characters from Wyoming who act as if they have IQs above room temperature," Johnson recently told the Star-Tribune.
He'll get that chance next summer.
In an email to his fans, Johnson announced Monday that A&E picked up a 10-episode season of "Longmire," a TV series based on Johnson's novels about Walt Longmire, sheriff of the least-populated county of the least-populated state.
The show will star Australian Robert Taylor as Walt and Katee Sackhoff ("Battlestar Galactica") as foul-mouthed deputy Victoria Morretti. Lou Diamond Phillips and Cassidy Freeman ("Smallville") will also star.
Johnson is the author of seven Walt Longmire mystery novels, beginning with "The Cold Dish" in 2004. Walt lives and works in the fictional Absaroka County, based on Johnson's home territory of Ucross, population 25. Locals refer to the area as the UCLA of Wyoming ? Ucross, Clearmont, Leiter and Arvada. It lies between Buffalo and Sheridan at the base of the Big Horn Mountains.
In a recent interview at his log cabin in Ucross, Johnson explained why he's so excited about a show in which Wyoming characters are more than just plot devices. Watch one of those CSI cop dramas, and inevitably a case brings a big-city cop to some back-water Western town. One episode portrayed a Wyoming sheriff "like he was in some road show from Li'l Abner," Johnson said.
"I mean, can you give us a little more credit than that?"
Besides the pilot, the deal calls for a full season of nine more episodes. Each will be shot in northern New Mexico, but Wyoming viewers may recognize some of the landmarks.
The Wyoming Film Office worked with producers as they looked for locations to shoot the pilot, sending information about several possible locations, mostly in the Sheridan area, said Michell Howard, manager of the Wyoming Film Office in Cheyenne.
Ultimately producers decided Wyoming doesn't have the infrastructure, such as sound stages and technical crews, to shoot a major TV series. But in June, the film office invited producer Chris Donahue and five other industry professionals to scout locations in northwestern Wyoming. Donahue seemed interested in shooting some Wyoming landscapes and possibly bringing Walt's white sheriff's department Bronco to film driving Wyoming roads. The office will continue to work with "Longmire" producers now that the project has been picked up.
"We would hope that we could get some of the filming here," Howard said.
"Anytime these projects showcase Wyoming story lines or locations, it brings a lot of attention to the state."
As a creative consultant for the pilot, Johnson spent three weeks on set in New Mexico. People ask him what it was like to walk into a world he created, to meet the people and see the places he had written about for the past eight years. He compares it to walking past a house plant every day when, one morning, the plant says, "Good morning. How are you?"
"It's great, but weird. Odd but wonderful," Johnson said.
"They built the entire Absaroka County Sheriff's Department. They had four Broncos there with the emblems on them. There was Walt's log cabin. Everything they did, they did with such a sense of detail."
The entire writing staff hopes to soak up the local feel of Powder River country, so prevalent in the books, by spending a week holed up at the Ucross Foundation, an artist retreat within strolling distance of Johnson's cabin.
Until recently, Johnson hadn't seen the pilot. He was on tour for his seventh Walt Longmire book and the first to make it on the New York Times Best Seller list, "Hell is Empty," when executives asked him to fly to Warner Brothers Studios for the screening. He had three book events planned that day, so his wife, Judy, went instead.
But as a surprise for their 13th wedding anniversary, she arranged for a copy to be sent to the house ? for their eyes only.
Johnson had half convinced himself that the pilot wouldn't be picked up, that it wouldn't be able to capture the essence of his characters.
"Not-much-to-my-surprise, it was fantastic," he wrote in his email announcement. "Now, the wait was like agony. The performances were magnificent, the camera work inspiring, the sets and location breathtaking, the writing as sharp as a razor.
"What if A&E passed on this? It would be criminal."
In the end, A&E didn't pass on it. And next summer, all of Wyoming can see what a county-24 license plate looks like.
I don't care where you go, I don't care where you hide, Johnson told the prop guy during the pilot shoot.
But if you don't give me one of those license plates to take back to Wyoming, I'm going to track you down.
Now that he has them at home, he said: "I'm dying to put them on my truck and drive around and see the face of the first HP that pulls me over."
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