Wild old-Florida ranch prairie at golden hour with a film camera crane

A Land Remembered Is Finally Becoming a TV Series, and It's Being Shot Right Here in Florida

Florida has never quite had its Yellowstone moment, the sweeping, generational saga that puts the land and the people who shaped it at the center of the story. That may finally be changing, and it's happening on Florida soil.

A misty Florida ranch at dawn with cabbage palms and a split-rail fence

Patrick D. Smith's A Land Remembered has been a quiet institution since Pineapple Press published it in 1984. The novel follows three generations of the fictional MacIvey family, Georgia migrants who arrive in the Florida scrub around 1858 with almost nothing and, by 1968, have helped pave over the wild country they once merely survived. Along the way they become Florida "crackers," driving half-wild cattle south to Punta Rassa for shipment to Cuba, and finally land developers grown rich off the very wilderness that made them. Smith was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and the book won the Florida Historical Society's Tebeau Prize as the state's most outstanding historical novel. For decades it has been widely taught in Florida classrooms and pressed on newcomers like a civic duty. Now it's heading to the screen.

Smith's central insight is what has kept the book alive: the same toughness that built Florida also consumed it. Each MacIvey generation gains a little ground and loses a little of what they came for. It's a tragedy dressed as a frontier story, and the frontier it describes was very real. Long before the causeways and the subdivisions, Florida crackers drove wild cattle, descendants of animals the Spanish turned loose centuries earlier, through hammocks so dense the sun barely reached the ground. They learned the country from the Seminoles, who ran cattle of their own. They endured hurricanes, Confederate deserters, and mosquito swarms thick enough to darken an afternoon. And they lived through disasters like the Great Freeze of 1894 to 95, when back-to-back hard freezes wiped out the citrus crop almost overnight and pushed a generation of Floridians farther south in search of warmth. The MacIveys are invented, but the families they stand in for were not.

The adaptation now filming is ambitious by any measure. Tampa-based filmmaker Todd Wiseman Jr. is directing a four-episode first season on a reported $25 million budget, with a cast led by Philip Ettinger, Lily McInerny, and William Catlett. The production has leaned hard into authenticity: more than 600 head of cracker cattle, a restaged Civil War battle drawn from the Battle of Olustee with hundreds of costumed extras, and a shoot spread across genuinely wild Florida locations, Micanopy, the sawgrass expanse of Payne's Prairie, ranch country near Dunnellon, and Pasco County. Wiseman turned down Georgia's roughly 40 percent film incentive to keep the production in a state that offers no such statewide rebate, a costly decision he's framed as a matter of getting the land itself right. Backing has come partly from the State of Florida and Film Tampa Bay, and producers plan to shop the series at the MIPCOM and TIFF markets this fall while it seeks a streaming home.

The story isn't set on the Treasure Coast, its heart is the Kissimmee River and the cattle country farther inland, but the arc it traces is our arc too. Before the condos and the traffic on the barrier island, Indian River County was scrub, citrus, and hard-won ground, and the tension at the center of Smith's novel, between the wild place and what we built on top of it, is the same tension that shaped this coastline. Whether the series finds a wide audience or becomes beloved regional television, A Land Remembered is finally getting the treatment it has long deserved, filmed on the land that made it.

Ava Cook
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