In this small town, friends and neighbors collide

Life gets hectic in the fictional world of Edgewater.
Fires are fought, marijuana is grown, laws are broken. But alongside that are sturdy, everyday people and serene scenery.
That’s the setting for “Sheriff Country” (shown here) and “Fire Country,” at 8 and 9 p.m. Fridays on CBS. Both are from actor-writer Max Thieriot.
“What really inspired me to create ‘Fire Country’ was this opportunity to tell a story rooted in the community I grew up in,” Thieriot said by Zoom. “It’s about resilience, redemption, the human spirit.” Plus messier things.
Theiriot grew up in Occidental and went to school in Forestville, towns of 1,100 and 3,200 in northwest California. He stars in “Fire,” pops up occasionally in “Sheriff” and co-created both.
They’re set in what Thieriot calls “this place where everybody sort of knows everyone and everything is that much more personal.”
Very personal. Sheriff Mickey Fox (Morena Baccarin, shown here) is the daughter of a drug dealer and the mother of a murder suspect. Her chief deputy wanted her job; another deputy is sleeping with Mickey’s ex-husband.
Some of these stories are temporary; the murder-suspect one sprawls across the first four episodes, through Nov. 7. Others continue in tangled webs.
The idea is to take us deeper into Edgewater. “We wanted to expand the universe,” said Joan Rater, who created both shows with Tony Phelen (her husband) and Thieriot.
They created the Mickey Fox character, cast Baccarin and built a “Fire Country” episode around her. It was, Baccarin said, “a bit harrowing when people kept saying to me, ‘This might be a spin-off, but it just depends on whether or not they like you.'” She was trying “to create this character very last-minute, without any police training.”
After the pilot (and a second “Fire Country” episode) succeeded, she and others had lots of cop-training. For Matt Lauria, who plays the chief deputy, that’s a big jump from his “CSI: Vegas” role as a crime-scene technician.
“It’s more fun to play with guns than to do field tests for gunpower residue,” he said. “Walking around with a utility belt and a Glock is pretty cool.”
At least, it is until you have to wave that gun at a friend, neighbor or in-law. That’s when small-town adventures get complicated.