Is Joe Pickett a Dangerous Fantasy or Good Ole' Fun?

Joe Pickett = Marlboro man + feminism + animal rights? This series adapts the C. J. Box novels about a Wyoming game warden turned crime solver. Here the western tropes do an about face. Pickett is not a hard-drinking sheriff or bounty hunter or ranch owner in a frontier town slapped together out of clapboard on the edge of a vast land recently cleansed of indigenous inhabitants. He’s a government employee in contemporary Wyoming, married with two kids. His wife isn’t dead like Walt Longmire’s or John Dutton’s in Yellowstone leaving those two Wyoming series protagonists free to act like the traditional lone wolf western hero. She’s around to call him to account when he reverts to maverick male behavior and oblige him to act in partnership with her. This is the new western hero: an animal lover, respectful of women, focused on his kids, only violent when backed into a corner.

The stereotypical western is a story of men fighting for control of a vast resource-rich land conveniently depopulated and ripe for the Lockean taking. John Locke’s theory of property says God gave land to all of humanity in common. But hey, if you mix your labor into a piece of land you can appropriate it for yourself, subject to the famous proviso that enough must be left in common for others. (To prove that Locke’s seventeenth century fantasy of natural law still wields influence, Michelle Obama recalled this for us from the podium at the Democratic National Convention.)

Westerns gave us a variation of this labor theory of value where the fastest gunslinger gets to keep the biggest piece of land. Locke forgot to explore how weapons might affect that genteel distribution of land among hard-working people (men) dripping sweat into dirt to substantiate their claim. The Homestead Act turned Locke’s idea into law. Then more laws establishing larger land parcels created a judicial basis for ranching, along with access to grazing allotments on government lands for a fee.

Into this regulated landscape comes Joe Pickett who dreamed since boyhood of becoming a game warden. In the first sequence of the show he faces off with a local guy, Ote Keeley, who is poaching deer out of season to harvest velvety antlers. Powdered deer antler velvet brings a high price in China and is banned by the NFL Why? It contains insulin-like growth factors, especially IGF-1, great for athletic performance and prohibited by the World Anti-Doping Agency. This scruffy working class local who lives with his irritable pregnant wife and meek daughter in a ramshackle trailer they’re about to be evicted from, is trying to feed his family in an area of few decent jobs. Pickett argues that deer need a protected season to produce and nurture young before they’re subjected to hunting. Keeley argues he’s broke. Righteous rules vs. the reality of how the economy functions for people in America’s flyover zones. Guess who wins?

Joe Pickett is a modern western hero who goes down better with the vegans, environmentalists  and animal lovers filling cities. (I’m not taking a position here; just trying to illustrate the polarities.)  Pickett reassures us we can manage our relationship with the world’s threatened natural spaces in a way that’s nice. He explains to his daughter, concerned about the fate of species felled by predators, that predation is good for everybody and makes prey stronger. So nature is inherently good and we just need to respect certain limits and rules, like hunting seasons and hunting licenses, and everything will be fine. Unfortunately, the extractive industries are not going to play nice.

From the 194os to the 196os westerns comprised a quarter of all feature films produced in Hollywood. John Ford’s Stagecoach of 1939 made John Wayne a star and kicked off this golden age while his The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance of 1962 helped draw it to a close. In the middle The Searchers, again with Wayne, brought the genre to an artistic height that makes this film pop up on many ‘100 best’ lists. Television went crazy with The Lone Ranger, Gunsmoke, Bonanza and many more. The western craze died out in the late 60s, then revived briefly at the end of the 20th century with Dances with Wolves and Lonesome Dove. The western is surging again but the symbolic coding has changed and the genre requires a bit of mixology, including stirring in other genres like the murder mystery.

The extreme male dominance of traditional westerns is a problem for modern audiences with female roles reserved for saloon hussies, mothers of cowboys or the good girl love interest. Joe Pickett responds with a family values fantasy. Marybeth Pickett is a lawyer but she’s staying home to raise her kids, a choice her upwardly mobile mom criticizes. Their modest home in the Bighorn Mountains of northern Wyoming (filmed in Alberta and Calgary; don’t all western landscapes look alike?) provides a pastoral idyll for modern consumers who gladly pay more for farmer’s market produce and take vacations to national parks.

This vision of living in untrammeled nature is a fantasy. Why? Because most non-urban areas of this country don’t look like northern Wyoming, a state with 584,000 people in 97,000 square miles. And because most women drop their kids at child care centers they can’t afford and head to their 9-to-5 every day while Marybeth plucks herbs from her garden and takes horse rides with her daughters after school. And because people who don’t own a big piece of land or have government jobs in Wyoming can end up breaking laws like poor Ote if they don’t land a job on the latest pipeline project.

In Joe Pickett even the landowners and government employees are breaking laws to cash in on a pipeline  that requires easements through lots of territory providing ample opportunity for dirty dealing. In the modern west where property lines are long drawn and recorded, the wars are over resource extraction.

The Picketts’ guns are symbolically coded the way black and white hats used to speak in traditional westerns. Despite being ridiculed by his well-armed male counterparts, Joe Pickett uses a .22 caliber rifle given to him by his dad when he was a boy that won’t kill anything bigger than a squirrel. This is the type of first gun countless American boys received so it evokes the childhood of men in America back when men still earned a family wage.

Marybeth uses a break action double-barreled shotgun. You’ve seen these a million times on western flicks when the character has to crack open the gun at the breech to reload. Given the flood of automatic weapons in today’s world this gun is now viewed as picturesque. The Picketts’ guns trigger our subconscious to evoke a nostalgic fantasy of the days when people living out on the prairie used guns to scare off intruders, helping us escape the times when disturbed teenagers spray their fellow students and teachers with hundreds of bullets in a few seconds.

Joe Pickett is so entertaining that, even though Paramount+ killed it after two seasons, a petition is circulating online asking some network to pick it up and film more. The new western is here to feed our stressed 21st century brains with updated fantasies of nature, ethics and the good life. What do you think?