By ANDY GILCHRIST
Arts Editor
For the past ten years or so, FX has been quietly establishing itself as one of the best networks on television for scripted programming. AMC has such award-winners as Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and The Walking Dead, while HBO has the much talked about Game of Thrones, Boardwalk Empire, and Girls. But FX has produced just as many, if not more, long-running hits as the more better known cable giants, including The Shield, Nip/Tuck, and Rescue Me, as well as currently running shows like Sons of Anarchy, American Horror Story, and The Bridge. But the best FX has to offer by far is its hill country crime drama series Justified.
The series follows two protagonists. The first is U.S. Marshall Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant), born and raised in Kentucky, who reluctantly returns to his native Harlan County from Miami when the series opens. Operating like an Old West sheriff, complete with a cowboy hat, Raylan doles out justice based on right and wrong, rarely letting the law get in the way of his bullets. Together with his boss, Chief Deputy Marshall Art Mullen (Nick Searcy), and fellow Marshalls Tim Gutterson (Jacob Pitts) and Rachel Brooks (Erica Tazel), Raylan isn’t trying to completely eliminate crime in Harlan, he’s just trying to keep the peace.
On the other side is Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins), a war veteran who returns to Harlan a bit before the pilot and immediately picks up his hillbilly criminal ways. But as the seasons have gone by, Boyd has evolved more than anyone on the show, and unlike anyone on TV, changing from white supremacist to preacher to would-be crime boss to convict to actual crime boss, all the while maintaining his status as resident wild card. Together with his wife Ava (Joelle Carter) and his brother Johnny (David Meunier), Boyd is never one to be counted out and as the current season begins, is working with mob figure Wynn Duffy (Jere Burns) to straighten out their new positions as area kingpins for the Detroit mob.
Justified succeeds for many reasons, but first and foremost is the acting. Olyphant’s Raylan is one of the coolest characters on TV, as calm in everyday conversation as he is when staring down a lowlife looking to kill him. But it’s the quieter moments when Olyphant truly shows his talent. With a less than perfect home life, including recently having had a child with his ex-wife and never having had a good relationship with his father, Raylan’s backstory provides some of the show’s trademark quirky humor, as well as some of its best acting.
Goggins, meanwhile, excels with the character of Boyd. Playing a character that changes so often might trip up an actor, but Goggins makes the audience believe that Boyd could be so many things combined. Goggins can easily do long dialogue scenes just as well as scenes of extreme violence, which often come back-to-back. He perfectly captures the homegrown former smalltime criminal who grew into a crime lord through sheer will, intelligence, and brutality.
The series is also unlike most others due to its use of main villains. Taking its cue from a long line of shows, Justified uses the “Big Bad” format, pitting Raylan and Boyd against a new and more vicious foe every year. While the two protagonists are often at each other’s throats, they are often both working against the same enemy, Raylan to put them in jail and Boyd to stop them from threatening his own criminal activities. Here is where the show truly excels.
Where most other shows, usually sitcoms, hire a big name guest star just to draw viewers, with the actor playing either a generic character or themselves, Justified hires well-known character actors to play well-developed and challenging antagonists. From local Harlan hoods to Detroit’s most sadistic enforcers, Justified rolls out villains unlike anyone else, each one being superbly acted and unique from anyone seen yet on the show.
But the show’s success goes deeper than just the award-winning acting and outstanding writing. Every episode makes the viewer feel like they’re down in the hills of Kentucky with the characters. In a time when every cop show takes place in a city, usually New York, it’s a breath of fresh mountain air to not just watch a show set outside an urban landscape, but go deep into hill country. With the exception of a few episodes, the series always shows the characters venturing out among the trees and backwoods of Harlan, encountering the always eccentric and perfectly acted locals.
Furthermore, the show rarely focuses on the rich and powerful, instead choosing to focus its lens on the poor and struggling of Harlan. The community survives by selling various drugs, most notably Oxy, making just enough to get by. In this way, Justified is more about the common man, the average American, than other crime shows, thereby appealing to a much broader audience. Raylan and Boyd perfectly personify this. Raylan is not trying to eradicate crime in Harlan; he recognizes how his world works and is just trying to keep things from spiraling out of control. Boyd, meanwhile, is chasing a constantly changing American Dream, leading to his regular identity shifts, but always revolving around the quest for power.
Justified is a rare show on television, not just because of its unique setting, incredible acting, and flawless writing, but because it has gotten better with each subsequent season. Where most shows start out strong and falter over the years, often changing their entire premise to try to draw in new viewers, Justified has only gotten stronger. By never forgetting that a great show is built on characters and story, it looks like the show can do nothing but keep getting better.
