The Biggest Mistakes You Never Noticed In Longmire
For fans of police procedurals like "NCIS" and "CSI," Netflix's "Longmire" is a breath of fresh air in a genre dominated by repetition. "Longmire” is a police procedural that swaps conventional city environments like Miami or Los Angeles for an old fashioned frontier, with a grizzled cowboy as its protagonist. Like in the Westerns of old, Walt Longmire (Robert Taylor) is a man out of time, struggling to adapt as the world around him advances.
Where other police procedurals will have teams of experts analyzing forensics or doing background checks, the Sheriff's department in Absaroka County, Wyoming, only has five people on a good day, and it runs primarily through Walt himself. It's a show that imbibes the best parts of conventional cowboy movies and uses them to spice up one of the most formulaic genres on television.
While it's absolutely worth a watch for fans looking for a new kind of crime drama, the show is far from perfect. Whether you're a new viewer or a longtime fan, the next time you tune in to see what Walt's up to, keep an eye out for some of these glaring mistakes that slipped past the showrunners.
The importance of spell-check
In Season 3 of "Longmire," Henry Standing Bear spends a short period in jail, and a major plot point in that season is Longmire's attempt to help out with Henry's case. Henry is a member of the Cheyenne tribe, and in real life, the Northern Cheyenne Nation in Wyoming is right next to where the fictional Absaroka County supposedly lies. Henry is a lifelong friend to Longmire, as the two grew up together, and in Season 3, Longmire often visits Henry in jail. However, whenever he visits Henry's cell, audiences might notice a weird mistake that almost seems intentional for how blatant it is.
The visitor badge the jail gives him is misspelled "VISTOR," and while it's not clear how that error made it into the final cut, it appears the show decided to just run with it — throughout the season, multiple characters visit the prison to see Henry, and each one wears that same silly badge.
Gun laws? Where do you think you are?
Throughout the series, there are multiple instances where Walt or another character references firearm registration. This is nothing new to the police procedural genre; in pretty much every crime drama to date, we've gotten a scene where someone tracks down the registration on a gun to find the owner, whether it's a murder weapon or just a misplaced pistol. "Longmire" is no different, though perhaps they ought to have taken a step back and thought a little harder about this common TV trope, considering their setting.
While Absaroka County may be fictional, the State of Wyoming's real-life gun laws are about as relaxed as possible. Not only do you not need to register your firearm to the state, but open carry is legal without a permit, and so is concealed carry. There's no limit to how much ammunition you can buy either, and there's no background check required when buying from a private firearm seller. Maybe the writers just wanted to make things a bit easier for Walt, because in real life, a misplaced pistol is all but worthless in Wyoming.
Hey, at least it looks cool
One of the biggest problems in both film and television is making an action sequence believable. If an audience isn't believing what they're seeing, there's no chance they can be invested in the onscreen drama, and the scene becomes a mindless fight that nobody really cares about. A big part of this (especially in cop dramas) is trying to make the actors' prop guns feel real to the audience. There's a layer of realism in the way someone carries a real gun versus a prop – and an audience can often tell just by the weight the prop has in the actor's hand whether it's real or not.
Longmire avoids these problems, as the guns are all very believable on screen. However, there are times where Walt's handling of his gun is questionable at best. In the Season 2 premiere, "Unquiet Mind," Walt hears a gunshot while approaching a house. He reloads his gun and cocks it back like a badass before rushing in — except he hadn't fired his gun yet, which means he just discharged a live round out onto the ground for no particular reason. Still, we guess it looked cool.
The twin suns of Wyoming
Okay, we might be able to forgive this one because it happened in the pilot, and it took a few years for the show to find its footing. Longmire's troubled development included gaps in filming due to wildfire outbreaks and a surprise cancellation in 2014. After the series' 3rd season, A&E axed the television series due to the unusually high age range of its viewers (despite pulling in decent numbers, the average age of Longmire viewers was 60, while their other programs were targeted at people in their 40s).
Regardless, in the show's inaugural episode, there is a pretty glaring (no pun intended) mistake that the show's later seasons would've been ashamed to have missed. While Walt and fellow sheriff Vic are driving around, each time the camera angle swaps position, so does the sun, lighting each character on opposite sides of the vehicle every time they cut.
Where did he even come from?
This one is more goofy than anything, but it's funny enough to warrant a mention on this list.
In the Season 5 episode "Chrysalis," Vic stops on the side of the road to question a man in a motorized wheelchair, with a little dog on his lap and an ice cream cone in his other hand. How he ended up there, or where he got that ice cream is beyond us, but he and the dog (whose name is Tito) chat amicably with Vic for a while before she drives off. As they're talking, Tito licks the ice cream cone about a dozen times, but none of the ice cream ever disappears, because the cone is fake.
We have no idea why they decided to include the dog and the ice cream in this scene, especially because that character is never seen again, and it's kind of distracting while Vic is trying to get crucial information on the case. Whatever the reason, it's certainly very funny and is definitely a mistake that viewers will want to watch out for the next time they visit "Longmire."