I'm having a little bit of a problem with Justified this season. It's on its fifth episode, which aired last night, and while I'm enjoying the season so far, it's not near as well-paced as last year. I think the problem is they have 10 pounds of story in a 5-pound show. Or more correctly in the Harlan County milieu, 50 Oxycontin pills in a 25-pill container.
There's just too much going on. We have dual (or dueling, eventually, I image) new villains in this season's story, Mykelti Williamson's Limehouse, the banker of choice for Harlan County criminals, and Dixie Mafia chief Neil McDonough as Quarles. And that's on top of returning bad guy Dickie Bennett (Jeremy Davies) and uber-villain Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins), who is definitely playing on the dark side's team this year. Last week there was an episode so crowded with new people that Ava, Winona, Art, Arlo, and Tim never even stuck their heads out to see their shadows. (Devil, unfortunately did.)
Last night the show borrowed a page from the new Elmore Leonard book, Raylan. It concerned the theft and possible resale of a person's organs, in particular Dewey Crowe's kidneys. The plot introduced a new character, a comely transplant nurse, Layla (played by Maggie Lawson of Psych fame) who flirted with and fired upon Raylan. And while the show was great, as usual, the amount of screen time given to Layla made her feel like a total throwaway character. She was on, she was gone. Lawson and Olyphant had great chemistry, too, so here's hoping she appears again (ditto for Carla Cugino as Karen Sisco...er, Goodall).
Beyond the Limehouse and Quarles subplots, Jere Burns is still lurking around the fringes as Win Duffy; Winona is pregnant with Raylan's child but has evidently flown the coop (at least it looked that way at the end of the episode), and Dickie is still...well, Dickie. He'd just as soon kill you as make you laugh. There's the spectre of Mags Bennett, left over from last season, with her money in Limehouse's hands and everybody--Dickie, Boyd, even young Loretta--wanting it. And the mystery of where it all went (or still is). It's a lot of story in a one-hour (well...44-minute) show. And I find myself wishing they'd slow down a bit and let things unfold at a less dense pace.
There's another small problem I have with this season: The humor. I know that Elmore Leonard's world of cops and robbers often portrays the lighter side of these characters. You can't accurately adapt Leonard without showing all the quirkiness he places in some of these people. But Justified is a little too broad this year. There's also a little too much of Raylan's stories (about his aunt defending her home from people looking for someone and of his mom running away from Arlo and hiding out in Limehouse's holler). These stories have pertinence to what is going on, but the downhome delivery reminds me sometimes of Dan Rather's rather annoying homilies when he was anchoring the CBS Evening News, especially on election night.
Still, don't get me wrong: Justified is the best show on TV right now. It has the most well-crafted characters and the writers know how to pace a story and let it play out throughout the course of a 13-episode season.
I'm currently watching all three seasons of Deadwood for the very first time (I'm on episode three of season two right now), and it's easy to draw an historical through-line from Olyphant's Marshal Seth Bullock straight down to Marshall Raylan Givens. Maybe Raylan is his great, great grandson or some such. Either way, he's still--as Winona put it in the very first episode of Justified--the angriest man I know.
Angrier then the Punisher?
Posted by: Pam | February 15, 2012 at 11:06 AM