There is an overabundance of streaming services in this modern era of movie and television consumption, each of which is vying for the precious time of consumers within the market. While HBO is the network that helped usher in the golden age of television at the turn of the century with the likes of The Sopranos and Sex and the City, it’s Apple TV that is delivering some of the most impactful television of the 2020s.
While most will immediately think of Severance and Ted Lasso, the dystopian science fiction drama Silo, created and run by Canadian writer Graham Yost, has also had a major part to play in the streaming service’s ongoing success. However, Silo is not the first time the industry veteran Yost has made an impact on the television landscape, as he also created and ran one of the finest shows of the 2010s, the Timothy Olyphant-led neo-western crime drama, Justified.
Adapted from a series of Elmore Leonard short stories, primarily “Fire in the Hole,” Olyphant plays Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, a wildcard of a federal official who tends to go by his own rules, even to the detriment of those around him. Yost and his writers waste no time in establishing Raylan’s character, as in the opening scene he provokes a criminal to pull a weapon on him, allowing him to claim self-defense when he shoots and kills him. His superior knows better, though, and as punishment for such misconduct he reassigns Raylan to his home of eastern Kentucky, the last place he ever wanted to be.
Upon returning to Harlan County, where he grew up, Raylan encounters several figures from his past life, including his career criminal father Arlo (Raymond J. Barry) who he despises, his ex-wife Winona (Natalie Zea), local girl Ava (Joelle Carter), and most notably, Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins), who Raylan used to dig coal with in his youth, but he is now a major criminal in the area and someone Raylan will often encounter throughout the show.
There are three major elements of Justified that sees it transcending many similar shows of its time: the characters, the actors, and the clever, intricate nature of its storytelling.
Yost and the show’s writers somehow managed to produce a never-ending stream of quirky and interesting characters that ranged from a mafia enforcer overly concerned with the rules of being a hitman, to a conniving butcher who acts as a money manager for the criminals of Harlan county, or one of my favourite supporting characters, the smooth-talking Dixie Mafia mobster with a love for tanning beds and RVs, Wynn Duffy (Jere Burns). Each season, then, pits Raylan against a new big bad, but Yost delivers the goods in each of its six seasons with villains that positively pop off the screen and act as fitting adversaries.
Of course, the show’s characters wouldn’t amount to much if the performances of the actors did not match the quality of their characters, but thankfully the acting is stellar across the board. Olyphant effortlessly utilizes his inherent charm to imbue true alpha, lead character energy into Raylan, while Goggins chews up every single scene he is in throughout the show as the eloquent but ruthless Boyd Crowder. Both earned Emmy nominations for their respective performances, while legendary character actress Margot Martindale and Jeremy Davies earned Emmy Awards for their performances as Mags and Dickie Bennet respectively, two major villains in the show’s second season. Throughout its six seasons, there is also appearances from talented actors such as Stephen Root, Neal McDonough, Carla Gugino, Patton Oswalt, Michael Rappaport, Garret Dillahunt, Mary Steenburgen, and Sam Elliott.
Yet, while interesting characters played by talented actors is certainly a boon, they are not much good to you if you don’t know what to do with them, but thankfully this was not the case with Yost and his team of writer, as Justified boasts some of the most confident storytelling of the 2010s. It was so often gratifying yet unpredictable, earning its biggest moments in ways that Game of Thrones’ final season could have only dreamt of.
A major factor in the show’s narrative brilliance is the complex, dense, deliberate manner by which the various elements of each season’s overarching story are constructed, making Justified an impeccably paced show. Nowhere is this on display more than in the show’s third season – which I personally think is the best of the series – where all the moving parts build into an exhilarating and satisfying crescendo of a finale, yet it still manages to shock in a masterfully understated closing scene, with the final line of dialogue sending shivers down my spine.
If it is not already clear, I simply cannot recommend Justified enough. Even the show’s penultimate fifth season – which many fans feel is the show’s weakest and least inspired, myself included – this is still top-tier television that delivers the character-driven goods, despite the inescapable sense that it was retreading narrative beats from season two. Still, the show bounces back to typical form in its sixth and final season, delivering one of the best series finales of all time, with Yost wrapping up all the relevant loose ends in an immensely satisfying manner.
And this is all without mentioning the recent limited sequel series, Justified: City Primeval, which admittedly doesn’t quite recapture the magic of the original series (Yost served only as a producer here), but it is still a worthy successor, and perhaps most importantly, it does a wonderful job of showcasing an older, more mature and measured Raylan, without losing the very essence of what makes him such a compelling and complicated character.
So, if you are looking for a new show to binge, and you appreciate crime dramas with a western genre twist and some of the best collective storytelling of the last 15 years, then Justified is must-watch television.