My love is “Justified”
The funniest, savviest backwoods procedural on TV premieres its fourth season tonight on FX
Topics: Justified, TV, Television, entertainment news, walter goggins, appalachia, appalachian, procedurals, Drama, Entertainment News
Let’s talk teeth. The often truly great, almost always truly enjoyable, only occasionally cartoonish FX show “Justified,” which begins its fourth season tonight, chronicles the pursuits of trigger-happy, white-hat-wearing U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant), his colleagues, the various perps he tracks down, and, most important, the charismatic gun-toting, lawbreaking residents of Givens’ place of birth, Harlan County, Ky., Appalachia central. All of these characters, not just the federal employees, but the lowlife hillbillies, drug addicts, prostitutes and general impoverished ne’er-do-wells who don’t look like they make it to the shower on a regular basis, let alone the dentist, have perfect, glistening, Hollywood-installed chompers. Boyd Crowther (Walton Goggins), “Justified’s” second lead, and the dreamiest bad guy on television, has a pair of (much-remarked-upon) pearly whites that should preclude him from pulling off heists in the dark, but most certainly do not.
I point out the teeth, which could all be found on any tooth-professional’s wall-of-big-smiles fame, not to crap on “Justified’s” verisimilitude, but to suggest that for a very good show, “Justified” has a uniquely functional relationship to verisimilitude — just enough to keep things fun. (It also takes a real joy in appearances: It is the most shame-free, equal-opportunity-ogling show currently on TV. There is a looker for every gender, and you are encouraged to look.) “Justified” is a serious drama, but it is not a self-serious one.
“Justified” checks all the boxes on the “serious drama” scorecard. It stars a hero with an antiheroic bent (Raylan Givens doesn’t want to shoot all these people, but he just keeps getting plopped into situations where he must. His body count is laughably high. Certainly his colleagues laugh about it pretty regularly) as well as a pure antihero in Goggins’ almost distractingly riveting Crowther, a skinhead turned evangelical turned bad guy-with-a-conscience turned bad-guy-without-a-conscience-but-still-with-intelligence. (Boyd Crowther is definitely the guy with a swastika tattoo on his bicep I have hated least in my life.) It has an extremely specific, rich, complicated backwoods Kentucky setting and in its second season put on a master class in paying off a long-term story arc in an emotionally and dramatically satisfying manner (cheers to you, Mags Bennett).
Willa Paskin is Salon's staff TV writer. More Willa Paskin.




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