Paramount decided to pursue multiple spinoff series, including “1883” and “1923,” and it was assumed that the tree would bear fruit for the next decade or so. Plans are just that, though, the best-laid intentions; they consistently brush up against reality to their detriment, and that’s exactly what happened to “Lawmen: Bass Reeves” over on Paramount+. What originally began life as a direct “Yellowstone” spinoff grew into something very different in the span of just a few years.
Like a lot of fun, dishy, Hollywood stories, the story of “Lawman: Bass Reeves” begins years before the project ever made it to air, in this case, 2021. The earliest frames of the pandemic produced some shows you still hear people talk about today, but none of them more than “Yellowstone,” Taylor Sheridan’s magnum opus at this point and a massive viewership driver for Paramount+ and The Paramount Network. Sheridan would sign a giant overall deal with the studio before all of these business developments, and was joined to “Lawman: Bass Reeves” as a producer in the early going, with series star David Oyelowo and his wife Jessica Oyelowo’s 101 Studios as the primary production partner with Paramount.
From there, the status of this project continued to morph over time, with Sheridan’s influence growing a bit with “Yellowstone” taking off for non-Paramount devotees, and it just made sense for the producer to help the story get a push by attaching it to the biggest thing on TV. Deadline reported that “Lawman: Bass Reeves” would now be a branching-off of “1883” instead of its own thing, and MTV Entertainment Studios touted its development at their upfront presentation in 2022. Viewers even had the tentative title to cling onto, as “1883: The Bass Reeves Story” would be the kind of awards-ready limited series that Paramount’s closest competitors had made such headway with over the last decade. And, for a while, that plan was on track and headed to streaming.
