A thread for JUSTIFIED, a TV show on FX starring Timothy Olyphant

Even other bad guys complaining about that there "baby head" feller!

one less good season with that run is almost more praise, just a little slip before they caught it

there was a little material that was lesser involving Detroit, maybe this is the patch that makes it worthwhile groundwork

Don't want to see any returning cast, except maybe Jere Burns, who hung around appealingly, but never seemed to have much to do for the last few seasons.

Justified was essential TV for four seasons, somewhat less essential but still good for one season, and then back to being essential before knocking that ending, that mere dialogue exchange, out of the park.

Yeah, I'd agree. If you're one of the people who never finished it, it is well worth it. Very satisfying conclusion, true to the series and the characters.

I quite liked the last season too, probably more than the first season

Don't want to see any returning cast, except maybe Jere Burns, who hung around appealingly, but never seemed to have much to do for the last few seasons.

― Chuck_Tatum, Friday, May 19, 2023 2:33 AM (six hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

what about my guy marshal tim?

Why spoil a six-season record of not doing much of anything (handsomely)

Tim is a great character just as amiably smirkily broken as raylan but scarily no sign of suppressed rage

What I love about this show is that like a lot of the prestige era shows it’s about toxic masculinity (before the prestige backlash when ppl were like STOP 👏 INTERROGATING 👏 TOXIC 👏 MASCULINITY 👏) but it wears it so lightly

Raylan’s deal is laid out explicitly in ep 1 “you’re the angriest person I know” and that’s kind of it, he stays that guy for the duration (5 minutes of the finale notwithstanding) but unlike all the other shows where People Don’t Change they don’t really dramatise his not changing that much, he just has cool adventures

otm

character development is the worst of all storytelling devices

🙌

Actually don’t hold to that but I am against it as dogma, so much great fiction is about ppl stuck in holding patterns (also life)

Original series was based on stories by Elmore Leonard, this follow-up on his novel, so that might be useful if show writers don't screw around too much (don't know if there's a continuity of contributors across both series, kinda glad this is mini-series, in terms of a clear arc, but still kinda bummed by the built-in lifespan).
Elmore knew something about Detroit: he used to get up at 5 am. make himself write a page before putting the coffee on. After brief breakfast he drove into the city and wrote copy all day. For years and years. I only read La Brave, wasn't that impressed---preferred Richard Stark and John D. MacDonald---but can see how his stuff lends itself so well to movies and TV.

La Brava

Stark and MacD's series stars were in good holding patterns, maybe the Raylan books do too? Might check.

xps Genuinely bleak and refreshing how arlo is both unredeemed and unresolved - these guys don’t process things they murder people

This is obv a sopranos move but inflected v differently here although the comic sensibility is related

dow you absolutely should give Leonard another go - he doesn’t have the meanness of stark but the dialogue & lowlife humour are top shelf

Actually seeing five, four novels and I guess the earliest stories, collected as Fire In The Hole.

the characters that go across multiple books don't necessarily change as much as they arrive at their proper destiny. jack foley from out of sight for example returns in road dogs, along with two other characters from separate previous EL novels, and they all wind up approximately where they belong for better or for worse.

the predictions for what how this show would end are still mystifying to me, so many folks were predicting/hoping for/eagerly anticipating the breaking bad type final stretch, but the warmer and narratively truer finish really hit home and lasted a lot longer than some artificially nihilistic closing.

i think about the last scene with raylan and boyd often

I think it's a good time to watch all this again - especially as there isn't one series running rn that is even close to as good as this was

i appreciate how it hints at the pain of the culture of the region with regards to drugs, crime, the mining industry, etc w/o seeming exploitative, or condescending.

xposts -- yes, amazing for a show to finish on one of its most memorable scenes

IIRC the original Raylan novels (Pronto, Riding the Rap) are pretty generic Leonard, but they might retroactively benefit from being read with Olyphant's voice in your mind. FWIW I think Freaky Deaky, Get Shorty and Swag are the best ones.

it's yonks since I've watched this but I recall some long night-time dialogue scenes with Ellstin Limehouse that were part of what elevates this well above the average usual stuff

I just finished Glitz (not a Raylan one), first class Leonard. There was this great little aside, that seemed kind of Raylan, where Vincent the main character is talking to a mobster who's making a big production out of his tough wiseguy routine and Vincent thinks to himself "They work so hard at it, don't they?"

The great thing about Leonard's crime fiction is that he shows you that most criminals are dolts with maybe one big-for-them idea that they're far too inept to execute properly. There are no criminal masterminds in his books, only people who've managed to stay one step ahead of criminals even dumber than them, but it never lasts.

new trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6KEgWSFfaE

for the spoiler averse: it seems to give away a lot.

boyd holbrook seems like a good adversary

The original Leonard novel City Primeval was subtitled High Noon In Detroit, so I can kinda guess where this will go. Very much looking forward to it.

I must say that the dead deer strapped to the back of a rusty old american car under grey skies at an anonymous gas station is michigan as fuck

Holbrook seems like a shoe-in for Justified casting imo

i think about the last scene with raylan and boyd often

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Friday, May 19, 2023 2:14 PM (three weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

great news! fx put it on youtube and i may or may not have watched it a half dozen times in the past week because it's perfect.

Just got to the first Wynn Duffy episode in the rewatch, Jere Burns is a HOF "that guy!"

I’m reading city primeval atm, the lead detective is a Mexican American named Raymond Cruz so I am just picturing Raymond Cruz with a moustache. They had to have been at least slightly tempted to cast him in the series right?

Olyphant still has the old twinkle, but the daughter of a cop conveniently being THAT naive/clueless/trusting is some irritating bullshit.

We watched the first episode and it wasn't great, but yes, very twinkly.

the Boyd Holbrook baddie is just about the lamest criminal character in Justified since the Rappaport one in that season of it I completely forgot

Yeah, this guy sucks. Maybe Wynn Duffy will pop up and kill him and the real story will begin...

Rooting so hard for this to be good but really not sure so far

Olyphant has slipped right back into the character tho, no complaints there. I think at least it will be a serviceable adaptation of the novel even if it doesn’t do justice to the parent series (btw the setup of these first two eps — clement mansell kills the judge on a whim when he gets in the way of setting up the Albanian — takes like 15 pages in the book)

I just think the tone/vibe is a bit lacking, it doesn’t need to match that of the old show but it’s a bit bland so far

First two episodes were ... fine. Wish it were a little zippier. Not sure what to do with a bad guy whose main motivation seems to be just being a bad guy.

There were a couple of scenes in the second episode where I thought, wait a minute, I know those places, that's not Detroit, it's Chicago. And I was right. Filmed mostly in Chicago, too, sound stage but also street shoots. Where I guess things were interrupted one night by actual crossfire:

https://deadline.com/2023/02/timothy-olyphant-talks-shooting-set-of-justified-city-primeval-chicago-1235256122/

Okay not reading this thread, just popping into say I decided to watch the series from the start on a whim after seeing this thread about SNA for a while and got damn, I love everyone in it (especially Winona, hard to confess that one to my wife).

Up to season 2 now, Boyd better keep walking that straight and narrow

Tapped out on this new series midway through episode 3. Having the villain (who is FUCKING BORING AND NOT EVEN A LITTLE BIT SCARY) tell a lie about his mom dying in a tornado and having said tornado appear on screen and suck Mama up into the sky is some Fargo bullshit.

It's driving me nuts that the villain's motivation seems to be just being a big asshole. The subtitle of the Leonard novel is "High Noon in Detroit," but this guy isn't much of an adversary, just compulsively adversarial.

But yeah, three episodes in and this is just not that good, (elder) Olyphant aside. I really can't believe they were satisfied with this script/story after the relentless sharpness of the show. Goodwill will get me to watch it, but damned if it isn't disappointing.

Part of the way into season 6 on the re-screening -

Forgot just how bad Michael Rappaport is, a real turning point from "corny but a decent character actor" to "fuck this guy"

Not that you'd want it to just be a cop-buddy-dramedy but it really shines when Rachel and Tim are heavily featured, I would have traded 15% of the Raylan and Boyd show for them to get more screen time.

Boyd gets less interesting the darker he gets - less charismatic without the family drama and more just an asshole.

Rappaport’s on-screen presence has gotten worse over the years as he’s become even more of a thin-skinned weirdo offscreen. That Justified character was supposed to be menacing and he just seemed perpetually whiny!

overall, the City Primeval miniseries was mostly a miss for me. the father/daughter stuff didn’t quite work, Keith David character was good but was only there to introduce the macguffin, Raylan’s womanizing seemed oddly charisma-free, and the other law enforcement characters were a non-presence instead of a good backing cast

and they cast an actor whose actual name is Boyd and then just made him a hyper-violent dork!

We never made it past the third episode. Should we?

I think that's where there actually starts being movement. Mansell and the Albanians meeting up finally gets some things moving, but it's still pretty bleak

I ducked out around episode 3 myself, then decided to come back to it. I was pretty satisfied with it by the end. I thought a lot of the “Raylan is older now” elements, like the relationship with the lawyer, were handled well, though it was pretty funny how quickly the female detective figured out that he had something going with the lawyer — as ever, Raylan is not as slick as he thinks. I continued to hate the villain all the way to the end, but I ended up feeling okay about it, because every single other character wound up hating him, too. The coda/tag, which I won’t spoil, felt tacked-on and excessively fan-servicey. So ultimately…ehh, but I don't feel my time was wasted.

I haven't read much if any Elmore Leonard so are the books close to the adaptation.

The original Raylan story, Fire in the Hole, is pretty close to the Justified pilot, fwiw.

Leonard is tons of fun, btw.