“Justified,” FX’s backwoods drama, has enough firearms to equip any militia. Set in Harlan, Kentucky, and based on the stories of Elmore Leonard, the show has guns peeking out everywhere: there’s the foster dad who keeps a “little Smith & Wesson”; the bartender who slips a shotgun from under her bar; the small boy who pulls a pistol in his living room. Early on, the show had an era of restraint in which the hero, Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (the tall drink of water Timothy Olyphant), tried to convince his bosses that he could hold fire. It didn’t take. “Doyle, the girl’s got a gun,” Givens announced to a crooked policeman during a typical showdown. “Yeah,” Doyle replied. “Who dun’t.”
“Justified” has gained a reputation as an undersung crime drama, as has “Sons of Anarchy,” a motorcycle-club series that is also on FX; there have been effusive comparisons to “The Sopranos,” “The Wire,” and “Breaking Bad.” This chorus rang out most strongly during the second season, when Margo Martindale split the show open with her astounding performance as the hillbilly matriarch Mags, an abusive mother who was also a savvy negotiator with the outside world. Still, it took me a while to catch up. Raylan’s aunt Helen remarks, “That’d be a neat trick, escaping the past,” and this axiom applies to television, too. After a decade of watching bloodbaths, it has become harder to stomach yet another long con, another giggling sociopath, another immersion in what Raylan describes as “shitkicker-on-shitkicker crime.” “Sons of Anarchy,” which features gang rape and “curbing,” has always felt like one step too far; that gory, thought-provoking binge will have to wait until next year.
“Justified” seemed more accessible, and, to a large degree, it delivers. As the show’s evangelists promised, the story of a cop who reluctantly returns to coal country offers thrilling and revelatory passages. Olyphant is perfectly cast as Raylan, the skeptical cowboy who attracts ladies like refrigerator magnets, but it’s Walton Goggins who gives the show’s slyest performance, as Boyd Crowder, a white supremacist who gets shot, then sheds his skin, again and again. First, he becomes a jailbird, then a preacher, then a humbled mineworker, and, finally, a drug kingpin. The series never quite earns its gushiest accolades—last season, especially, was a serious step down—but it has qualities all its own: in an age of cable gravitas, it’s genuinely funny, with the pungent eccentricity of Elmore Leonard’s universe of odd birds. Amid the gunfire, there’s romance and, at times (although less so as the seasons pass), a rare bluntness about race and class. This season, the series’ fourth, begins well: the first two episodes introduce a snake-handling church, a welcome return to the show’s local Kentucky flavor, which was diluted during last year’s focus on Detroit mobsters.
Still, what going back to the beginning revealed was that “Justified” had itself shed its skin: it started as an episodic procedural, like “Law & Order” or “CSI.” As its audience grew, it changed course, experimenting with a more serialized form of storytelling, with mixed results. “The Sopranos” and “The Wire” radicalized the crime show by telling their stories not as episodes but as seasons—the famed “novelistic” approach. In contrast, “Justified” spent its first season hopping merrily among discrete narratives, folding these episodes into the story of Boyd’s ministry, a tale of true belief turned tragic. In Season 2, the show reversed those proportions, emphasizing arcs above episodes, in order to chronicle the black-humor ballad of Mags, who killed a man, tried to adopt his daughter, and forged a canny bargain with a corporation that wanted to strip-mine her land. That season had its one-offs (or “monster-of-the-week” plots, to use the term of art), but the family mythology was rich enough to take up space, allowing the show to delve into complex themes of Appalachian pride.
Last season became yet more serialized, only to hit a wall, hard. Extended storytelling has its own conventions and clichés, all of which appeared in Season 3. Instead of the savory one-offs that had made the show such a treat, there was a slow-burn plot about competing cliques: a villain named Robert Quarles (Neal McDonough) and his Detroit-based Mob bosses, a tough and noble African-American community, Boyd’s gang of crooks, and a handful of other troublemakers. In particular, Quarles’s hustler-killing sadism felt both corny and queasy. The show still had tangy dialogue (“Next one’s coming faster,” Raylan shouts, throwing a bullet at a man’s chest), and that Olyphant amble, but late in the season, when one character intoned, “There’s a war coming,” my heart sank: it echoed every cable drama, in the worst way.
The truth is, “Justified” works best when it embraces its procedural roots. Or, to put it a different way, “Justified”—and TV in general—works best when it tells each story at the length it deserves, whether that’s an episode, three episodes, or two seasons. Mags’s story needed thirteen episodes in order to play out every emotional beat, but many of the show’s elegant, oddball tales work just as well in forty minutes. These stories also more closely resemble the twisty little noirs that Leonard writes, or those by Flannery O’Connor; knotty and compressed, they’re tiny tales with philosophical depth. In Season 1, there was a shaggy-dog plot about an accountant for a Mexican cartel who becomes a kindly dentist. With thugs at his heels, he heads for the border. His clueless girlfriend appears, at first, to be a comic dupe, but toward the end her innocence becomes his salvation; as their luck runs out, the episode turns into a meditation on human change. There’s an O. Henry coda: the strange, small revelation that he’d become a dentist for the most peculiar reason, inspired by a TV Christmas special. Then this character, played so well by Alan Ruck, up and dies, allowing his story to pay off, rather than living on to fuel another plot. In a short story, a small-time loser gets to lose.
As I watched “Justified” ’s narrative expand and contract, it was hard not to think of Showtime’s espionage thriller “Homeland,” which just ended a disastrous second season. The show’s original twelve episodes were a mini-masterpiece, a propulsive scenario paired with a reasonably thoughtful exploration of U.S. policy on torture and drones. The second season began well, but it imploded into schlock—the creators had fallen in love with the chemistry between their stars. When a bomb went off in the finale, it killed every corrupt or shady character, a convenient metaphor for the show’s problems: it had been purged of complexity, a side effect of success. The surviving ensemble—Carrie and Brody, Brody’s family, Mike, Saul, and Quinn—were now cursed with, at worst, the flaws of the antihero: brilliant but unstable, willing to break rules in the name of justice. That’s not an original story, let alone an interesting way to examine foreign policy.
This has always been a risk with “Justified,” too, since its most charismatic badasses—Raylan and Boyd, as well as Ava, the tough lady they’ve each romanced—have a deep affinity not just with one another but also with the audience. Like a gun, charm can be deployed as a form of protection or as a destructive force: you never want your favorite series to become fan fiction about itself. My fingers are crossed for this season, which opens with Raylan living above a bar and doing freelance bounty-hunting jobs, with a baby on the way. (He’s alienated from his pregnant ex-wife, a character who, like many cable helpmeets, has inspired a homicidal response from viewers who don’t want anyone nagging their hero into date nights.) A nifty mystery emerges: Who got away with a skyjacking robbery? How is Raylan’s rotten dad involved? And what about that church, a perfect echo of Boyd Crowder’s fundamentalist fever back in Season 1?
I’m eager to hear these stories, absolutely. But I hope that the show will include some stand-alones as well—stories like the one in last season’s best episode, an absurdist romp that involved an organ transplant. It was silly, it was strange, it was sad, and then it was over. ♦
