Last year's first-season finale of FX's Justified didn't end merely with a cliffhanger. It ended in the middle of a chase scene -- and as the down-home law-and-disorder drama series begins its second season tonight (Wednesday) at 10 ET, it picks up right where it left off. But before long, we're thrown into a whole new story line of second chances, new villains, and an artful mix of comedy, drama and character that does series inspiration Elmore Leonard proud...
Based on Leonard's Fire in the Hole story, Justified centers on Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, played to playful perfection by Timothy Olyphant. For the second series in a row, he stars as a man who speaks softly and carries a big hat.
On David Milch's magnificent HBO Western series Deadwood, Olyphant portrated a more reluctant and taciturn lawman -- and, as sheriff Seth Bullock, was wonderful in what could easily have a career-best role and performance.
Instead, with his very next series, Olyphant captures, without a single false note or showy overreach, the heart and soul of another impressively distinct, and memorable, TV character. And one who, for the most part, enjoys a few rounds of verbal sparring.
Olyphant's Raylan Givens doesn't just stare down danger without flinching. He plays with it, like a cat with a field mouse -- or, in the case of tonight's excellent premiere, like a cold-as-ice marshal squaring off against a country hothead who's wielding both a loaded gun and a dead rat.
Raylan is a crack shot, but he's just as liable to crack wise -- and to defuse situations with his fast patter and arrogantly persuasive manner, rather than drawing and firing his gun at almost every opportunity.
That was last year. This year, with a twinkle in his eye, he sprays a bad guy with gasoline instead of bullets -- and gets his man just the same.
Except, this season, the man he's after who's running things in Kentucky isn't a man at all -- but a backwoods matriarch named Mags Bennett, played with an icy drawl by Margo Martindale, whom cable purists should recognize from recurring roles on both FX's The Riches and Showtime's Dexter. She, too, prefers to wield different weapons when dealing with adversaries. Poisonous moonshine, for example. Or one of her obedient, none-too-bright sons.
Executive producer Graham Yost and his team have moved their primary pieces all over the chess board this year. Walton Goggins' astonishingly nuanced Boyd Crowder, the ostensible villain as the series began last season, is the finest example of this.
He went through last year having a religious epiphany that few people took seriously, enduring an epiphany about that epiphany, and ending the season by siding with Raylan in a shootout to the death -- but not theirs.
This season, what is Boyd up to, and which side is he on? Tough to say -- and the same goes to Natalie Zea as Raylan's ex-wife, who shows increasing signs of wanting to be an ex-ex. Like other plot lines in Justified, they're not predictable, not neatly resolved, and not at all common to what's dramatized elsewhere on television.
Like most of the best dramas on TV, Justified is also, when it needs to be, one of the best comedies. It's a show that will make you laugh, but it's also a show that's perfectly capable of making you gasp. And, most definitely, making you think about its characters long after the show itself is over.
A bit of full disclosure: Between seasons on Justified, one of our TVWW contributors -- my own son, Mark, whose column here is called The Son Also Criticizes -- got a (paying!) job as a writers' assistant and producer's assistant on Justified. But I was enthusiastic about the show before he climbed aboard, and I see no reason to stop now. In fact, for the record, I'm quite proud of him.
And that's why, these days, he's not often writing for us. He's very busy, at the moment, not writing for Justified...