Fire Country gets spin-off with frankly terrible name

Let’s start with this: Fire Country is already a pretty bad name for a TV show. Besides setting you up for potential Avatar: The Last Airbender jokes from pitiless nerds—i.e., “We were having a good night watching TV until the Fire Country attacked”—it’s also just a little on the nose. What do they do in Fire Country? Fight fires, all the time, apparently. We’ll give it this, though: At least it’s not something truly silly, like, say, Sheriff Country, a title that implies that spontaneous bouts of sheriffhood are constantly breaking out all over the place, consuming whole communities in a blaze of runaway jurisprudence.

Anyway, CBS announced today that it’s putting a TV show called Sheriff Country into development. The series, which won’t arrive on TV screens until the 2025-2026 season at the earliest, is a spin-off to Fire Country, in what we can only assume is an attempt to recreate the success of Dick Wolf’s Chicago Insert Dramatically Interesting Public Service Here franchise, except out in rural California.

Despite being very far off, though, Sheriff Country already has its star lined up: Morena Baccarin, who will always be “Firefly star Morena Baccarin” in our hearts, will play, you guessed it, “straight-shooting sheriff” Mickey Fox, who’s the step-sister of the character played by Diane Farr on Fire Country. (For some reason, that specific familial connection cracks us up: Just close enough to justify minimal crossovers, as needed, but nobody asking “Why didn’t you call your step-sister?” if something truly dramatic happens.) Baccarin has already been backdoor-piloted into the mothership series, conveniently, having played the character in an April episode of Fire Country, which is currently in its third season, and producing the kind of ratings for CBS that, well, gets a network in the mood to greenlight spin-off shows fully a year before they can actually make it to air.

[via Deadline]