‘Lawmen: Bass Reeves’ showrunner Chad Feehan: ‘It was honestly the greatest hero’s journey I’ve ever heard’ [Exclusive Video Interview]

When Chad Feehan was approached by producer Taylor Sheridan and actor-producer David Oyelowo to create and run a limited series that told the true story of Bass Reeves – the first Black deputy U.S. Marshal west of the Mississippi in the 1800s – it was a no-brainer. “I grew up in Texas and first heard about Bass as a young child,” Feehan recalls. “I had an uncle who was a storyteller and told me about this gunslinging lawman in the Old West who was never wounded and had over 3,000 arrests. That idea of Bass never left my consciousness.” When he started researching Reeves and digging into all the details of his fascinating life for the eight-part western saga that premiered on Paramount Plus, Feehan says, “It was honestly the greatest hero’s journey I’ve ever heard.” We spoke with Feehan as part of our “Meet the Experts” TV Showrunners Panel. Watch the exclusive video interview above.

What exactly was it about Reeves that so blew Feehan away? He responds: “For a man to be enslaved and forced to fight for the Confederacy, then escape enslavement and hide amongst the American Indians for a number of years, then come out of the Civil War in the era of Reconstruction, which was for me an inspirational period in American history. To be afforded the opportunity to be a lawman in that time was kind of mind-boggling.”

The fact that Reeves was such a racial pioneer leaves one to wonder: why is the man who broke Major League Baseball’s color line, Jackie Robinson, so famous, but Bass Reeves is so comparatively little-known? Feehan believes the color of his skin played a primary role in his lack of widespread renown throughout history. “I also think that by the nature of the time period, those stories were easily erased, much more easily than they were in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s. When Jim Crow came along about 1877, 1878, they started to erase all these stories of these heroic Black and Native American and other citizens who had an enormous impact on this country.”

Feehan is honored to lend a hand in reversing some of that mystery when it comes to Reeves. And he had a enthusiastic partner in Oyelowo, who not only portrayed Reeves in the series but also served as executive producer. “My relationship with David is the best collaboration I’ve had hands-down in this business,” he emphasizes. “As talented as he is as an actor, he’s even more gifted as a human being. He’s incredibly generous, incredibly patient, incredibly kind, and one of the people I’ve come across whose work ethic makes me embarrassed for my own – which is hard to do. And aside from bonding sort of emotionally and spiritually, we bonded over the character.”

Besides getting on so well with Oyelowo, Feehan was also highly fortunate to find a Texas Christian University professor named Sidney Thompson who had spent a decade researching Reeves and written a historical novel trilogy about him. “We immediately hired him as a consultant and optioned his books,” he says. “I used part of his first book for the pilot. We had him there with us, meeting with us twice a week, reading every script, fact-checking everything we did. And granted, the show does take liberties and there are fictional components to the show. But it was incumbent upon us to be as authentic to the time and the reality of the place as we could.”

It also to elevate the quality of “Lawmen: Bass Reeves” that it was able to surround Oyelowo with such a talented supporting cast that included Dennis Quaid, Barry Pepper and Donald Sutherland. “You submit scripts to these actors that you sort of grew up idolizing and you hope and you pray and you think there’s no way that they’ll say yes,'” Feehan admits. “And we got incredibly fortunate that we got the cast that we did.”

While “Bass Reeves” was designed as a limited series, here has been discussion about making it an anthology and coming back with a second season focusing on “giving another great historical lawman or lawwoman their due,” Feehan says. “Whether that happens or not, I don’t know. But certainly the success of the show has lent itself to those conversations.”

“Lawmen: Bass Reeves” streams over Paramount Plus.