Longmire Season 5: Show Cancellation by A&E Was a Blessing, Season to Have Longer Episodes!

Longmire Season 5 is going to be a great one for the fans of the series. The popular Western crime drama was launched in the A&E Network, but the network bosses were not happy with what they were getting from the show.

The show had an immense following, but since the demography of the audience didn’t match the preference of the advertisers, the network decided to end the show.

The decision to discontinue Longmire came after the show completed Season 3. The network said that the viewers of the show fell in the 65+ age bracket and this wasn’t acceptable to the advertisers who would be selling their products during that time slot.

The products being advertised were for a younger demography and hence they pressurized the network to bring in a show that catered to the younger audience.

After A&E Network announced that they will not be able to continue with Longmire, Netflix picked the show up from Season 4. Season 4 was a great hit for Netflix and they decided to go ahead with Longmire Season 5.

The fifth season is going to be back on September, next year and will not only have more episodes, but also longer ones. Netflix had previously decided to run 10 episodes of Longmire Season 5, the same number of episodes that were there in the fourth season of the Western crime drama series.

However, seeing the kind of popularity that the show enjoys, the producers decided to run a larger number of episodes for the coming season.

Lou Diamond Philips, the actor who plays the role of Henry Standing Bear in Longmire Season 5 said that the longer episodes with a running time of 45 minutes will ensure that the secondary characters get a chance to be unveiled in the series.

The short time span makes it difficult for the characters to be developed properly since there is always a time crunch. The longer they are, the more time there will be to explore aspects of the story that were previously left out because of editing.

Longmire focuses on Walt Longmire’s struggles in his personal and professional life and with the time crunch of 42 minutes, different aspects of the story were being left out of the final cut.

This caused the supporting actors to lose out on screen space and didn’t give the series enough time to develop the other characters who play such an important influence on Longmire’s life.

To maintain continuity of the story, the cuts were made, but now with the episodes almost touching the one hour mark, the series will get more space to expand and let the story grow.

John Coveny and Greer Shepherd, the executive producers of Longmire are ever grateful to Netflix for taking up Longmire and having enough faith to go ahead for another season with them.

The content head of Netflix, Cindy Holland added that Netflix was moved to see the dedication of the team who worked for Longmire and that she has never seen a team cry over the fate of their television series.

Lou Diamond also added that Netflix gave the showrunners more freedom in running the series than what they received from A&E Network. It seems like the cancelation of Longmire from A&E Network gave it a new lease in life and made the show more popular.

Longmire is based on the novels written by Craig Johnson. His Walt Longmire Mysteries series had been picked up by John Coveny and Hunt Baldwin and turned into a popular crime drama.