Giddy up for Stumptown.
E! News has your exclusive sneak peek at Stumptown, ABC’s new series starring Cobie Smulders, Jake Johnson and Michael Ealy. Set in Portland, Oregon, the series is based on the comic book series of the same name and follows private detective Dex Parios. Dex is an Army veteran struggling with PTSD, personal drama and a lot of debt.
“Portland used to feel like a small town,” Smulders’ Dex tells Johnson’s Grey, her friend and bartender, over action-packed clips from the series premiere. “But these days, traffic, it just keeps getting worse. Is it too much to expect some good old-fashioned neighborliness, or do I just sound super old?”
“Ancient,” he says.
So, why doesn’t she get a new, more stable and less dangerous job?
“And let someone else have all the fun? Nah,” she says.
How I Met Your Mother veteran Smulders said she looked at the character as a new challenge, and one she wanted to tackle for years to come.
“I think when you go into something that could potentially, not to jinx anything, go for multiple seasons, you want to choose something that you’re never going to be bored with, that’s going to be challenging, that it’s a character that you want to live with for a while. And I just fell in love with this character,” Smulders said at the 2019 Television Critics Association press tour. “And there are certainly aspects of [HIMYM‘s Robin] Scherbatsky in there, but it is a departure…But it was more about finding something that I think would always be challenging and always interesting and fun to play rather than finding something a polar opposite or a genre that I really loved. I just want to be her for a while.”
Stumptown, which also stars Tantoo Cardinal, Cole Sibus, Adrian Martinez and Camryn Manheim, premieres Wednesday, Sept. 25 at 10 p.m. on ABC.