‘Sheriff Country’ Boss Teases Mickey’s ‘Reckoning’ About Boone & Ben McKenzie’s Return

Can Mickey (Morena Baccarin) and her mom, Eva Santos (Rachel Ticotin), find a way to work together in Sheriff Country Season 2? Well, they are on the same case now, going after a cartel, but Mickey still hasn’t forgiven her for leaving; flashbacks reveal why, though the sheriff isn’t privy to that. There’s also some setup for Mickey’s interest in Boone (Matt Lauria). TV Insider spoke with showrunner Matt Lopez about that and more. Warning: Spoilers for the Sheriff Country Season 2 premiere ahead!

Mickey handles the news of her mom being alive by getting so drunk that a fellow sheriff (Ben McKenzie‘s Wade) calls Boone and Cassidy (Michele Weaver) to pick her up. And as they help Mickey into bed, she tells Boone she messed up when he told her how he felt and made the wrong choice.

Then, it’s when Santos meets with Skye (Amanda Arcuri) that we get the flashbacks showing that she had been undercover when she was with Wes and had Mickey, and in order to ensure for a lighter sentence for him, she had to leave and not return stateside for 10 years.

Plus, to set up the potential medical spinoff, Bonne says that Dr. Henshaw (Noah Reid, who will be appearing on Sheriff Country this season), owes him $50.

Below, showrunner Matt Lopez breaks down the premiere and reveals what’s ahead when McKenzie returns, with Mickey and Boone, and more.

Ben is going to be back for more, which we knew because of his character description, teasing he has a few secrets of his own and that’s not in the premiere. So far, we’ve just seen the Mickey and Wade dynamic a bit. So what can you say about what we’ll see when he does return? Is there any connection to the ongoing case and, if so, what does that means for Mickey because of their history?

Matt Lopez: The return of Sheriff Jim Wade will take place a little bit later in the season. Actually, the chapter that you’ve sort of waded into, you’re about halfway through. It’s really our first four episodes. He actually won’t return in that span. He’ll return and become part of our much bigger sort of season-long mystery, a little bit deeper into the season. What we’ll find out about him is we’ll peel back the history of their friendship. The fact that Jim Wade has a very almost uncle-like, he’s Skye’s godfather. He’s a very trusted member of Mickey’s inner circle. And while they’re more or less the same age and became cops at the same time, Jim actually became sheriff over 10 years ago, whereas Mickey, it’s like the last two to three years. So when some stuff comes up, some sort of difficult and thorny questions come up, Wade is a resource for her and a trusted person she can go to. Then as we get a little deeper into season, as you alluded to, there may be more to Jim than we’re seeing.

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How many episodes is he going to be in after the premiere?

It’s a little bit undetermined right now, to be perfectly honest. Ben is a busy working actor and filmmaker. I strongly recommend his documentary. It’s fantastic. But I think he will be in multiples. Let me put it that way. He’ll be in several episodes.

Santos is trying to talk to Mickey, even going to Boone to try to convince her to help with the cartel. What’s it going to take for Mickey to actually warm up to her?

It’s classic Mickey Fox. She puts up her walls and she decides, “This woman can’t hurt me. She left my life when I was six years old.” She’s practically a stranger and strangers, as she tells Eva, come into my office all the time and I get along with them, no problem. We’ll see that increasingly tested. And Mickey, with the help of Boone and with the help of Wes, I think will realize that she has to face this. It may not end all pretty with a big red bow on top, but there must be a reckoning with her mom, a woman who left her life early. But I think as we get into Episodes 3 and 4, one of the things the audience as we unpack this relationship will find really delicious is how similar Mickey and Eva are in many ways, this ability to compartmentalize their emotions. Skye also will play a big role in that, in this kind of very dysfunctional makeshift family with Wes, Mickey, and Eva.

Speaking of Skye, the conversation that she had with Eva is when we got the flashback. We saw everything that led to her leaving her family. Talk about having it in the premiere and not holding that back

I think the audience would just be clamoring for it. As storytellers, one of the things we debated in the writers’ room, not to show you how the sausage is necessarily made, but the way Season 1 ended, Mickey, this is your mother, practically begged for a direct pickup. Let’s just pick it up right there and continue and get the whole story. And I love to subvert the audience’s expectations when we can. So the idea came to start Mickey in this really low place where it’s like 18 hours after that scene, she needs to be scraped off the floor of the Drake County Sheriff’s Office by Jim Wade and Boone and Cassidy. And then it’s to Skye that Eva will unpack the story of what happened.

I felt, too, let’s face it, a mother abandoning a child is one of the biggest taboos in a culture. Fathers can get a free pass sometimes, maybe not a free pass, but get off the hook a little easier. For mothers, it’s tough. And we want the audience to really care about this relationship, and if there’s going to be any sort of restoration of any kind of relationship between Mickey and Eva, I think we need to understand how brutal the choice Eva made was and how perhaps misguided, but essentially well-intentioned it was. She believed she made a deal so that Wes would be out of prison, and she knew that the community would be there for Mickey and for Wes. And she was right in that sense. And in later episodes in 3 and 4, we’ll really unpack the emotional cost to Eva that came as a result of that.

Mickey, while drunk, tells Boone she made the wrong choice when he told her how he felt — loved that moment — but the next day it seems like she doesn’t remember or she’s just not ready to talk about it and wants to see what he says. So how does Mickey feel, and what does that mean for them this season?

One of the big things we’ll be dealing with all season long is unpacking that moment. There are some tremendous episodes coming up with Mickey and Boone sort of really grappling with their relationship. And honestly, I think it’s some of the finest work Morena and Matt Lauria have ever done, certainly on this show. And Mickey will really have to wrestle with the fact that she had this affair with Alec Kane, a corrupt DEA agent. She let him into her life and their lives, and then he shot Boone. And in the episodes that are moving forward, Boone, both the psychological and physical toll of that will continue to complicate the Mickey and Boone relationship. So Mickey has a real reckoning coming up with the damage that she caused, not intentionally, but by falling in love.

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And then you have that Dr. Henshaw reference, which I liked. How much will that continue leading up to Noah’s debut? Are you going to pepper them in?

There is, there is. There’s fun little Easter eggs. Mama Jo [Deborah Hedwall] will make her return in an upcoming episode before we meet Dr. Hud Henshaw. We’re actually shooting right now, Episode 209, which is Hud’s big introduction, and it’s fantastic. Noah Reid is terrific, and his chemistry with Morena is off the charts.

What is that dynamic like?

It’s fun. So there are three Henshaw boys, and we will meet at least two of them in the course of the season. The two younger ones are doctors. The oldest one is sort of a chip off the old Mama Jo block, and he is a black market cannabis cultivator. He’s like a young, sexy Wes Fox who Mickey always had a crush on. When she was 12, he was 15 and kind of unattainable. With Hud, it’s more like brother vibes because what we’ll unpack is how when Wes Fox went to prison, Mickey stayed with Mama Jo Henshaw and the three boys. So with the older boy, she’s always had this simmering sort of crush. And with the younger boys, it’s more like a teasing brother and sister relationship, and it’s so much fun.

Sheriff Country, Fridays, 8/7c, CBS