FX's Justified- Pilot

A few days before FX premiered its new show Justified (which I was really excited about) I learned that the show was an adaptation of an Elmore Leonard book. I had mixed emotions about this because I used to be a big fan of his books but sort of abandoned them mainly due to the bad taste the recent string of awful adaptations left in my mouth.

Aside from Get Shorty, the sarcastically self-aware style of Leonard's prose seems to get lost in translation when it is moved from the page to the screen. Disappointingly, the first episode of Justified, for the most part, continued this trend.

The show started strong enough, with a scene featuring Tim Olyphant, as U.S. Marshall Raylan Givens, in the midst of a standoff at a table in a fancy restaurant with, the always welcome, Peter Greene (they bad guy from the Mask, Redfoot from Usual Suspects) as a "gun-thug" from Miami. It is clear that only one of the men is going to walk away from the table, and since Olyphant is the star of the show, it is safe to assume that it would be him. The gun-thug makes a move towards his weapon and Raylan blasts him from under the table before he can cock the hammer.

After this initial action, the show begins to take on the "cartoonish" quality that pervades many of the Leonard adaptations. Raylan, who personifies this cartoonishness with the silly hat that he insists on wearing both indoors and out, is punished for the restaurant shoot-out by being transferred from the Miami office to his home state of Kentucky (I have been to Kentucky, they don't wear cowboy hats there, for the most part).

His assignment in the Bluegrass State is to bring down a crew of way over-the-top white-supremacists with a penchant for explosions and bank robbery. (This storyline involves one of the more annoying TV show cliches in which law enforcement has to
"catch the bad guys in the act" in order to arrest them. It is as if all of the TV writers, other than David Simon, have never considered that an actual investigation might be a good way to catch a criminal.) The leader of Aryan gang is a old acquaintance of Raylan's from his coal mining days named Boyd (played by The Shield's Walton Goggins, in what should, on paper at least, be the perfect role for him). The plot thickens when Boyd's brother is murdered by his own wife, Ava. It turns out that Ava and Raylan might be old flames and Boyd has always had a thing for his brother's wife.

FX is usually successful at creating TV shows that exist in their own worlds; worlds that share characteristics with the real world but operate by their own set of rules. Sons of Anarchy is a perfect example of this. Of course it is completely unrealistic for a biker gang to control an entire town with impunity, but in the world of Charming the audience can buy it. I had a more difficult time buying the world of Justified. In the past I have compared the characters is SOA to comic book heroes and I have generally meant that to be compliment. In the case of Justified, the same can be said, but in this case I would argue it is a negative thing. From Raylan's goofy hat, to his cliche of a catchphrase ("You make me pull, I'll put you down") to the extremely brazen (bordering on just plain dumb) behavior displayed by the Nazi gang, the whole vibe of the show was way over-the-top and difficult to identify with. Are we really supposed to believe that in a single week, in a tiny Kentucky town, the following events occurred without resulting in a single arrest, much less a call to the National Guard: A terroristic hate crime involving a military-issue rocket-launcher, a shoot-out involving Nazi's and federal agents in the middle of the street in broad daylight, a domestic violence related murder, a dead body found in a car, a bank robbery, and police-involved non-fatal shooting.

Olyphant is very good as the leading man in the show. Barely contained rage is evident in his eyes, and even more evident because the other characters are constantly pointing it out. The only real issue I had with his performance is he seems to slip in and out of his accent (even when he is using it, it doesn't really sound like a Kentucky accent). I was a bit disappointed in the work turned in by Walton Goggins. The Boyd character is so much in his wheel house that I would preferred a bit more subtlety and bit less wacky-violence and empty threats.

While it would hyperbolic to say that the premier of Justified absolutely sucked, I think it is fair to say that it did not live up the expectations associated with an FX program. I guess a fair description of my feelings after the show would be "underwhelmed". Stay tuned and cross your fingers that the show can make some serious improvements.