Paramount+ has unveiled the official trailer for Lawmen: Bass Reeves starring David Oyelowo ahead of its two-episode premiere on November 5th.
The clip shows Oyelowo taking up the mantle of the first Black deputy US Marshal west of the Mississippi from Judge Isaac Parker (Donald Sutherland), who says that he needs “a man with a good gun and a straight spine.” At one point in the clip, a young man asks Reeves, “Are you a lawman or an outlaw?” He responds, “A bit of both, I reckon.” Watch the trailer below.
Lawmen: Bass Reeves is based on the first two books of The Bass Reeves Trilogy by Sidney Thompson: Follow the Angels, Follow the Doves, and Hell on the Border. Conceived as an offshoot of Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone prequel 1883, the series was executive produced by Oyelowo and Sheridan with creator and showrunner Chad Feehan, who shared a statement to accompany the trailer.
“Growing up in Texas, I heard a lot of stories about Bass Reeves,” he said. “They were always akin to a dime novel hero with incredibly fanciful flourishes of a gunslinging lawman pursuing the most-hardened outlaws in the Wild West. Somewhere in my childhood that myth of Bass took firm root in my consciousness and never left.”
Feehan continued, “Our story explores the lawman, the husband, the father. It begins with enslavement and carries through Reconstruction to the first cruel whispers of Jim Crow; it contains some of the well-known tales, some of the untold tales, and a fair share of fictional tales that fill-in the in-between.”
The cast of Lawmen: Bass Reeves also features Lauren E. Banks as Reeves’ wife, Jennie; Demi Singleton as his daughter, Sally; Barry Pepper as Esau Pierce, leader of the 1st Cherokee Mounted Rifles; and Forrest Goodluck as Billy Crow, a young Cherokee man with an affinity for dime store books and gaudy style.
