The Joys of Justified and Its Main Villain

Watching, absorbing and then writing about Lost on Tuesday nights over the last few months has meant not being able to write about another fine show that airs the same night.

 I'm talking about FX's Justified, which has been having a phenomenal freshman year. It airs its season finale next Tuesday night.

As I wrote a few weeks ago, the show had initially disappointed some viewers, who expected a more serialized drama rather than a crime-of-the-week procedural.

  (My response: Who cares if it's a procedural when it's the best procedural on TV? And it's nice for once to be able to recommend a show without telling people they need to go to Hulu or iTunes or Netflix or their video store to get caught up first.)

 In the last few weeks, it's begun balancing both the procedural and serialized aspects of its story, before finally switching over to all-serial in the home stretch.

 But no matter how it approaches its story, Justified is a great show for a lot of reasons. 

 First off, the writers have kept the spirit of Elmore Leonard -- smart dialogue, well-drawn characters, varying levels of bad guys and just the right amount of tension -- alive long after the initial story the show is based on had been told.

 It has a wonderful leading man in Timothy Olyphant. Deadwood showed us he could play an Old West style lawman, but here, he's doing something different. Raylan Givens is maybe a little more relaxed than Seth Bullock on Deadwood, but no less dangerous.

 Olyphant's backed up by a fine cast as well. Nick Searcy, who plays his exasperated boss, might be my favorite supporting player on any non-Breaking Bad drama this year. 

 But the main reason I like Justified are the criminals Raylan finds himself dealing with every week, played by a phenomenal collection of character actors.

 Some of them are sympathetic, like Alan Ruck (AKA Cameron from Ferris Bueller's Day Off) as a dentist in witness protection who goes on the run after forcibly removing two teeth from an obnoxious patient.

 Some of them are stone killers, like W. Earl Brown (another Deadwood alumni) as a convict who takes a guard hostage inside Raylan's office. 

 (Hostage situations on TV are tricky. They often start scary, but unravel as the hostage-taker becomes more and more sympathetic. Here, Brown's character never became likable -- he was serving several life sentences -- but Justified managed to humanize him, saving us from any number of cop show cliches).

 Some were just plain scary, like the soft-spoken psychopath mob enforcer played by Jere Burns. (He's been equally great as Jesse's NA counselor on Breaking Bad. He's a versatile guy.)

 But the best bad guy of all has been Raylan's main antagonist* this season: Boyd Crowder, a neo-Nazi turned fake-preacher gun, played by the marvelous Walton Goggins (pictured above).

  *Yeah, I supposed it's possible to approach the show from a more existentialist POV and say that Raylan's biggest enemy is Raylan. But that's a little less fun to watch.

   One of my least favorite cop show/movie conventions is the "Who Me?" killer. By that, I mean a criminal who gets out of jail, then spends all of his/her (but mainly his) time taunting the police. 

 But when Goggins does it on Justified, claiming to be a man of God who's turned his back on his evil past, it's a joy to watch. 

 That's partly because we're never sure whether Boyd is just lying to the cops, or lying to himself as well, and partly because Boyd is so over the top in his protestations. (When you start by making Jesus comparisons, it's hard to go higher.) 

 And Raylan and his boss don't react the way normal TV cops might. There's no "This bastard's gotta slip up sometime!" speeches. The only time anybody gets really mad is when Art -- Raylan's boss and an actual Christian -- loses his patience with Boyd's Bible quoting.

 Don't get me wrong: they want him back in jail. He's already killed an informant, and last week's episode saw Boyd buying a rocket launcher, a call-back to a crime he committed in the pilot.

In the next two weeks, we'll see how this all plays out. With luck, it will end in a way that keeps Boyd alive and Goggins employed, and maybe earn him one of the Emmys he should have gotten for The Shield. If not, then we at least have strong reason to hope that a second season of Justified can give us villains equally -- if not more -- fascinating than the ones we saw this year.

 Tom Coombe