Sheriff Country’s Morena Baccarin Opens Up About The Cool Way She Prepared For The Fire Country Spinoff

Morena Baccarin as Mickey sitting in a booth at a resturant in Sheriff Country.
(Image credit: Christos Kalohoridis/CBS)

There are plenty of cop shows on TV, and many of them take place in big cities – think Blue Bloods, Law & Order, Chicago PD, and so on. However, when CBS’s 2025-2026 prime time lineup kicks into high gear on the 2025 TV schedule, we’ll be getting a new small-town cop show with Sheriff Country. So, now, the star of this Fire Country spinoff, Morena Baccarin, has opened up about the cool way she prepared to play the sheriff of a small town.

For a couple of years now, there’s been talk about Fire Country expanding into a franchise, and it’s doing just that by introducing us to Edgewater, California’s sheriff’s department, in the first spinoff, Sheriff Country. While speaking to TV Insider about leading this new series, Morena Baccarin also shared how she’s been preparing to play Sheriff Mickey. And that includes riding along with officers who work in Upstate New York, as she explained:

It’s a small town, so it’s kind of perfect. There’s not a lot going on sometimes, but then it changes on a dime.

As someone from a small town, I know this to be true. Some days, some weeks, in fact, not a lot happens in terms of news. However, in the blink of an eye, that can change dramatically, and before you know it, a whole bunch of people from one community can be involved in an intense situation.

That’s also proven to be the case on Fire Country, where Mickey was introduced in Season 2. So, I expect we’ll see more of the same on her show.

However, back to how she prepared. Baccarin dove into the questions she wanted to ask the cops she was riding along with. She said she was extra “fascinated” in the “little things” about their lives, especially when they didn’t have much going on, she said:

But I was more fascinated by the little things when there’s not much going on. Do you take your belt off when you sit in your office? Things you wouldn’t think about, like when you are writing endless reports, do you take a coffee break? Do you go break it up with, oh, an eviction notice? If you want to make something happen, do you search for people to pull over?

I love that she was thinking about all these questions for a few reasons. One is that I had never thought about this before. When I think about law enforcement, I’m not considering the mundane part of the job; I’m thinking about the action-packed part. And that leads me into my second reason, which is the fact that she has thought about this, which tells me we’re in for a good time when Sheriff Country premieres.

Clearly, she’s fascinated by this world she’s going to dive into in Fire Country’s spinoff, and that makes me even more excited to watch the show.

Now, I really can’t wait for Sheriff Country’s Season 1 premiere on CBS. We aren’t that far off from it either, as it’ll make its debut on Friday, October 17 at 9 p.m. ET. If you want to stream it, you’ll be able to do so the day after episodes air with a Paramount+ subscription, which is also the service you can use right now to go back and watch Morena Baccarin’s introduction to Edgewater in Fire Country.

Riley Utley
Weekend Editor

Riley Utley is the Weekend Editor at CinemaBlend. She has written for national publications as well as daily and alt-weekly newspapers in Spokane, Washington, Syracuse, New York and Charleston, South Carolina. She graduated with her master’s degree in arts journalism and communications from the Newhouse School at Syracuse University. Since joining the CB team she has covered numerous TV shows and movies -- including her personal favorite shows Ted Lasso and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. She also has followed and consistently written about everything from Taylor Swift to Fire Country, and she's enjoyed every second of it.

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