Why Big Sky Fans Shouldn't Hope for Cassie or Jenny to Find Love with Jensen Ackles' Beau Just Yet

When audiences last saw Jenny Hoyt (Katheryn Winnick) and Cassie Dewell (Kylie Bunbury) in the second season of Big Sky, the former crime-fighting partners were getting acquainted with newly appointed sheriff Beau Arlen (Jensen Ackles) while knocking back some after-work drinks.

Picking up a few months after the events of the finale, the third season of the hit ABC crime drama, subtitled Deadly Trails, will find the team investigating the mountainous mystery of a missing backpacker who could be linked to Sunny Barnes (Reba McEntire), the head of a family backcountry outfitter business with a secret history of missing customers. Sunny is "a parent who will do anything to protect her family, to protect the people she loves," showrunner Elwood Reid tells TV Guide. "And the question with her soon becomes, when does she cross that line? … As the season progresses, you begin to see, 'Oh my God, there are layers to this woman. She's even darker than I thought.'"

Below, Reid talks about the process of convincing Ackles and McEntire to join the show, the challenges of balancing new episodic mysteries with a longer serialized arc this season, and the difficult balance that Beau is trying to strike between his personal and professional lives as he grows closer with Jenny and Cassie. (Be sure to come back to TV Guide immediately after the premiere to read a full breakdown of the episode.)

During last week's Television Critics Association panel, you said you were taking a different approach to writing the third season, in terms of introducing some cases that can be solved in a single episode while still writing a larger mystery for the entire season. Can you talk about what makes this season different from the first two?
Elwood Reid: With the addition of someone like Jensen Ackles, he's a tool that you get [to use] as a writer. He's someone who I've always, always admired and a guy who has done 15 or 16 seasons as a series lead, so he's a guy I've always wanted to work with. Having him join the team allowed me to tell enclosed mysteries week-to-week—and we won't always do that. There will be some episodes where the larger arc involving Reba McEntire's character, Sunny Barnes, will take over the narrative. But by and large, it allows him and Jenny to go off and solve a crime each week. It's a challenge, and I think it's [a direction] network television needs to head. If you're doing streaming or cable, it is always serialized storytelling. I think network has the ability to do both [episodic and serialized]. And I won't lie to you: It was an extreme challenge, but I think the show is a lot better for it. It moves faster. Our characters get to meet quirky Montana characters every week, instead of me introducing everybody and then playing with the same pieces all year. So it's a lot more work, but a lot more tools for me to use, and we've got some amazing guest cast coming in this year.

What kinds of early conversations did you have with Jensen and Reba about their involvement in the show and how their characters will fit into the story going forward?
Reid: With Jensen, he wanted to know a little bit about [Beau's] backstory, about what caused him to come up there. It's been serviced in the show a little bit, and it'll be serviced more this year. He's a guy who screwed up back home, and it cost him his marriage, and he's coming up there to follow his ex-wife (Angelique Cabral), his daughter, and the man that his ex-wife married (Henry Ian Cusick), and he was sitting in a cabin doing nothing when he was tapped to be sheriff. So for Jensen's character, he wanted to know, "What's his primary motivating driver?" And for [Beau], I think it's no secret, and we talk about it in a few episodes: He's still in love with his ex-wife. And at the same time, he starts to have some feelings for some other folks in the show. You start to see a little bit of warming up to that as the season goes on.

For Reba, [it was] a totally different deal. I grew up with Reba's music, and it meant a lot to me, so whenever you meet an icon like that or someone you admire, I was really, really nervous about Reba's quote-unquote "brand" out there in the world. And in our show, we bring people on, and they don't always do great things. They're not out pulling cats from trees and walking old ladies across the street; they do some pretty dirty, dark things. So I was really nervous about pitching her the character.

Just a little funny side story: I was in the middle of pitching it, and we were getting along fine. We had friends in common, and I got to the part where she asked about her character. So I described her as "a mother bear that will do anything [to protect her family]." I said, "Reba, I love your personality, but I've always thought there's a little bit of darkness in you." And there was dead silence, and I was worried she was going to protect her brand. And I heard in the background, this large voice yelled, "That's right. Let's do this!" And then in walks Rex Linn, her boyfriend [who plays Sunny's husband on the show]. I had no idea he was paying attention to the Zoom. And he's like, "I've been telling her she needs to do this!" And then she lit up, she leaned in, and she's like, "Oh, that sounds so interesting. I'd love to do that."

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I think this is something she enjoys in real life, which is mysteries. She loves these sorts of dark mysteries, because I get texts from both her and Rex, particularly from Reba, whenever I turn a script in. She's like, "I love the script so much!" She wants to know where the story is going, and she loves whenever her character does something bad. Now, when I say bad, we have a history of the Legarskis (John Caroll Lynch) and the Ronalds (Brian Geraghty) of the world. One thing that you do with an actor like Reba is, you make her [character] act understandable. She's not a psychopath. She has a reason, she's got this big old messy family that she's gonna do anything to protect, so that feels like it can sit with her brand.

I love this movie that she was in called Tremors. I knew her as a country music star, and just to see her in that, I was like, "Oh my God." I just assumed, after that movie, people will be using her in movies and TV shows for the rest of her career, and she kind of went back into her music career a little bit and popped up here and there and did the Reba show, of course, and some Hallmark shows and stuff like that. But for me, I feel like I found a diamond sitting on the shelf that no one had used in a long time. So to have a chance to work with Reba and to do this kind of role that is 180 degrees from anything she has ever done is super exciting, and I can't say enough about her. She's an amazing partner.

Where does the third season pick up? How has Beau adjusted to working with Jenny and, in a way, Cassie?
Reid: Beau, who we saw come in at the end of the last season, has settled in and taken the role of the sheriff pretty much permanently from Sheriff Tubb (Patrick Gallagher). Cassie is continuing to heal a little bit from the death of her father and her experience with Ronald, and Jenny has moved on from the drama of Travis (Logan Marshall-Green) last year, so it's a little bit in the past. And some other characters who were tangentially involved last year—Tonya (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) and Donno (Ray O'Nan), who are related to Ren (Janina Gavankar)—have settled into town full-time, much to the dismay of our team.

When we open up the first episode of the season, what we learn is that he's gotten to have a "relationship" with Cassie—and I use the term in quotations because I don't want you to take it in a romantic connotation. But she's somebody he can confide in and talk to about the state of his marriage and his daughter—his estranged daughter who is living with a man that his ex-wife remarried. So they have a relationship, and on Jenny's side, he tries to keep that relationship purely professional. That, as you know, with Jenny Hoyt's character, has mixed results. She tends to be her own boss; she doesn't need anybody telling her what to do. But like we saw at the end of last season, they do work together really well, he supports her. At the same time, she always has his back. I don't want to use the term bickering, but they have a fun back-and-forth professionally, in the workplace.

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Beau seems to click with both Jenny and Cassie, so a lot of viewers would be quick to suspect that there is another love triangle brewing. How would you describe the dynamic between the three of them? Do you think Beau has romantic potential with either of them, or are you not looking to explore that right now?
Reid: We are. As a writer, I'm very cautious of the minute I put a leading guy into the mix. I don't think it's good storytelling to immediately have all the stories be about two women swooning over or fighting over this guy. It's not realistic, and it's not the kind of storytelling I think we need to be doing in this day and age.

But I think what's interesting about it is, he has a work relationship with Jenny. She's deeply curious about his personal life. She meets his ex-wife, and his ex-wife is very similar to her in many ways. Cassie has had a lot of tragedy in her life, and we're gonna learn that she and Beau have had some shared tragedy. He's done something in his past that he's not too proud of, and some things have happened to them. But that's a relationship that is off-limits to Jenny. She doesn't go there with him.

And in talking with Kylie at the beginning of the season, she really wanted to explore that sort of relationship [with Cassie and Beau]. I'm very open and listen to my cast. I think a lot of times, their intuition or their guts are telling me something that I should listen to, and we had Cassie in and out of relationships last year, and the same thing with Jenny. And [Katheryn and Kylie were] like, "Can we try something different?" And they were right—both of them are right. But there is a relationship that's gonna be budding on the "glamping" site with someone involved in the story with Cassie. You'll start to see sparks of that in the first couple of episodes, which is really interesting, given what's going on with the Barnes family.

Big Sky airs Wednesdays at 10/9c on ABC.