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Cautionary Tale: Justified: City Primeval

Posted by :letitia.carelock@gmail.com On : August 23, 2023
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Category: Book & Movie Reviews, Inspiration

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Too much of a good thing can be bad for you, and I think there is no better example than TV shows that get after-the-fact mini-series or additional seasons after their initial run, like Justified on FX. For those who are not aware, Justified was an FX show starring the infinitely talented Timothy Olyphant as US Marshal Raylan Givens, based on the book series written by the late Elmore Leonard. Givens is a modern day cowboy of the most badass variety, and Justified is a love letter to urban cowboys. I wish I could say the show was perfect, but it is far from that; in my opinion, it should only have had four seasons. I found season five to be bad except for the most epic villain death in television history (if you must know, look up “Justified Twenty-One Foot Rule” on YouTube and sit back and enjoy), and season six was dogshit. Therefore, when it was announced there would be a new mini-series ten or so years later, I remained cautiously optimistic and began to tune in each week via Hulu.

And what I found is unfortunately a lot like when Dexter ended, then returned to try and close the loop a little better the next time around.

Which is the subject of today’s episode of Cautionary Tales.

So all the way back in the year of our Lord 2015, I wrote a cautionary tale blog post about Justified’s lousy final season. To sum it up, the last season was very forced and it was apparent the writers had no more good ideas as they’d used them up in seasons 1-4, so the last season ended on a pathetic whimper and I won’t get into it because it’s a sore subject. But I knew all the way back then that there was a finite amount of talent in the writers’ room, and I had hoped that the big gap of time between the end of the original run and the revival would have given them the time to find a good story. I actually bothered to grab the book that this series is loosely based on, City Primeval by Elmore Leonard, just because I wanted a preview of what I might expect here. The book has a reputation for basically being a middle of the road title for Leonard’s career, but the reason I’ve brought it up is because of the context. This book has nothing to do with Raylan Givens. The book is actually about a character named Raymond Cruz, but the Justified producers decided to take Cruz out and plop Raylan in since the show, while never an enormous hit, had a modest viewing of two million viewers until the final season, which lost about half a million viewers after season five was NOT good and season six was even worse. They knew they had a built in audience that would likely return for a revival, so they decided to take the plot from the book and just assign it to Raylan instead.

And honestly, I think it was a mistake.

Not a huge mistake. Not a catastrophic “I hate this” mistake.

The problem is that this revival is nothing but wheel-spinning.

Let’s get into why this is today’s lesson of cautionary tales.

Naturally, massive spoilers for the ending of Justified and for episodes 1-7 of Justified: City Primeval. At the time of this post, the series finale has not aired, so this is more of a retrospective recap and discussion of where I think things went wrong.

Alright, so here’s the basic set up: in the original series, Raylan was reassigned back to his hometown of Harlan county Kentucky after he shot a mobster to death in a crowded restaurant in broad daylight in Miami. Long story short, the original series ends with him surviving Harlan and going back to Florida, which was where he was before the shooting. We pick up close to ten years later with a very seasoned Raylan dealing with his preteen daughter, Willa, whom he had with his ex-wife Winona, and Raylan catches a case that sends him up to Detroit, Michigan. Now, Raylan is very familiar with some Detroit mobsters that had a foothold in Harlan county because it’s a backwater town full of gross racist pieces of shit and so the drug trade is huge in Harlan and so is the general crime. After arriving to Detroit, he crosses paths with Clement Mansell, an Oklahoma Wildman who has no regard for literally anyone or anything. Through sheer dumb luck, the judge Raylan was working with runs into Mansell and Mansell snaps, killing the judge and his assistant in their car in the dead of night and taking the judge’s book full of blackmail material on dozens of Detroit citizens. Mansell, who is a career criminal but managed to walk on a technicality thanks to his lawyer-under-duress, Carolyn Wilder, then gets with another one of his associates named Sweetie to start blackmailing the people in the judge’s book to make money off them, citing that once he has enough, he and his side piece bimbo Sandy will retire to the tropics.

Now, that sounds like an alright idea on paper, but unfortunately, I think the bad writing from the final season carried over into this one. The biggest problem of the show so far is that while I get that Raylan is a fish out of water, none of the things that make him a great character other than that sly sense of humor and swagger are present in this mini-series.

Raylan Givens has two important things working for him as a US Marshal: he’s incredibly intelligent and observant and he’s an amazing shot. Those two traits define him as a character. Most of the fun of the original show is watching the Harlan criminals figure out that Raylan’s intelligence and perception mixed with being a crackshot make him next to impossible to evade or defeat. And what I’ve always loved about Raylan is that he is always fair. Almost every time he’s had to confront a convict or an escaped felon, he explains exactly what he’s going to do and what their situation is and he lets them make a choice. And 99% of the time, the dopes in Harlan county think they can either outthink or outdraw Raylan and they are dead wrong, pun intended. So I was excited to see Raylan in a new environment, ready to see him adjust and change and grow in this new city.

And yet I’ve gotten 7 episodes of absolutely nothing.

I’m someone who understands that a new series can mean that they make changes and I won’t necessarily always like said changes, and that’s okay. The issue I have with this particular change is that it makes me wonder why they bothered to tell this story if Raylan’s intelligence and amazing shooting skills are not at all in use this entire series. He never gets the drop on Mansell. He and the Detroit cops fumble the investigation so badly that I frankly would be annoyed if I were a real Detroit cop because they basically make them look incompetent. The decision to basically neuter Raylan and not give him any decent leads or even just use his own intuition to figure out how to get this guy behind bars is infuriating. The difference with this series in particular is that it’s not like Mansell is very clever in how he commits crimes. The guy is blatantly doing whatever he wants, but the Detroit cops are so stupid that they somehow still can’t lock him up. So forgetting the judge and assistant’s murders, he also attempts to rob an Albanian guy at gunpoint and breaks his leg when the guy doesn’t have any money for him to steal. He was caught on audio by the police trying to blackmail a civil servant. He murders his co-conspirator, Sweetie, and burns down the bar. He executes the guy whose condo he and his bimbo had been staying in, basically for no reason, in broad daylight in an upscale condo. Did you read all of that? Now explain to me how the heck the cops can’t find any hard evidence or anything to get this guy locked up?

I’ll tell you how: shoddy writing. And unfortunately, this has been a problem for as long as fiction has existed. Often, lazy writers don’t want to make a villain smart and always one step ahead of the protagonist because it’s “too hard,” so what they do instead is simply make a dumb protagonist who bumbles all the attempts to catch the villain. And that’s really the biggest issue I have with Justified: City Primeval. The writers decided to take the easy way out by making the Detroit cops idiots and make Raylan a neutered puppy who can’t anticipate any of Mansell’s moves or gather any evidence that would lead to some kind of conviction. All of the momentum of the previous show is not present in this mini-series.

And you know, I’d be less salty about it if the content we’re seeing that is not Raylan investigating Mansell was good, but it’s not. Now, I will say that Raylan and Carolyn Wilder’s fling is by far the only legitimate enjoyment I’ve gotten out of the show. You’re welcome to throw a Criminal Offensive Side Eye at me for it; I’ve wanted Timothy Olyphant to have a black female love interest for 10 years and this series gave me exactly what I’ve always wanted (just no sex scenes, grrrr) and I’m okay with my own bias in that regard, but everything else in the show suffers as a result of the show not delivering good content. The performances are good, don’t get me wrong, but nothing is even coming close to the enjoyment we had back in Harlan county with the kooky criminals and the interesting fellow marshals in Lexington. This revival comes across as a cash grab leaning on an established IP to get viewers.

And based on the reactions from the Justified fandom, I don’t think the show is hitting for them either. I’ve been hearing complaints about Raylan’s lack of police work since episode two. I personally had reserved judgment and was hoping it was going slow in the beginning, but it would pick up in the middle, but it didn’t. The needle has not moved an inch. The entire plot is only moving forward because of Mansell, not Raylan, so in the end, it makes the show feel like Raylan was the Decoy Protagonist and the show is instead all about Mansell, who is an irritating piece of shit in every regard, and it annoys me greatly that this actor’s fangirls have clogged the Tumblr tag with a bunch of disgusting simping for a man who murdered his own mother in cold blood and threatened to rape an underage girl in front of her father. But that’s a long story I’m not gonna get into.

The central fact of the matter is that if you’re going to resurrect a show, then you have to do your due diligence in—and pun fully intended here—justifying its existence. From what I read of the book, it was a decent story that was worth telling. This story is not worth telling. It adds nothing to Raylan’s dimensions as a character and the “rivalry” they are attempting to set up with Raylan vs. Mansell is weak because the show has not developed it. I went through my head and thought about how many scenes Raylan and Mansell have had together and oddly enough, it’s not very much. He gets under Raylan’s skin because he’s a slimeball and knows it and yet the laws of man somehow just don’t apply to this guy, but that’s it. There is nowhere near the history between them like some of Raylan’s far better opponents like Boyd Crowder or Dickie Bennett. They might as well have just not made this revival in the first place if the only thing that would be good about it was Raylan gettin’ it on with a smart, powerful black woman who can handle him in a way none of the skanks he’s slept with in the past ever have. (Yes, I said it. Every woman Raylan has ever slept with in the original show was a skank. Come at me, scrublords, I’m ripped. )

Some of the issue, too, is that the supporting cast is nowhere near as strong as the one in the show’s original run. Our cast of characters is too big and so no one’s getting the focus they should have in order to make them more interesting. I already mentioned that Mansell has a stranglehold on the screentime and everyone else is left with pieces. There have been two majorly important conversations between Raylan and Carolyn that were cut short that I think was a massive mistake: seeing how they hooked up for the first time, and this most recent episode when she bluntly asked him how he would get Mansell’s prints on the murder weapon. We should have seen more content for Carolyn, Sweetie, and the detective that Raylan’s been partnered with, Wendell. None of these relationships are elaborated on enough to really make us care about what’s transpiring. It’s all too much of a light touch with Mansell as the focus, and frankly, if the new show is so enamored with this douche, then you should have just adapted the book as-is instead of including Raylan since Raylan isn’t getting to do anything the entire time.

I also want to take a little aside here and mention a pet peeve of mine. Anyone who knows me knows about my theory about what I call White Bitch Syndrome. White Bitch Syndrome, in a nutshell, is when writers coddle white female characters (and 90% of the time they’re also blonde) when everyone else in a story has to pay for their mistakes and live with the consequences of their actions. The number one reason I hated the final season of Justified was because the show went full White Bitch Syndrome with a character named Ava Crowder, who basically spent all six seasons being a reprehensible piece of shit and got away with everything solely because white woman. Now, the bimbo Sandy Stanton is nowhere near the level of cunt that Ava Crowder is—and yes, I use that term sparingly, but Ava Crowder has earned it, trust me—but she is still being coddled and I absolutely despise the way that she’s been Mansell’s accomplice, but only now does she realize he doesn’t care about anyone but himself and would kill her the second she defected. It’s not fair for you to make all these other characters pay for their actions, but she gets to walk because she’s blonde, white, and female, but again, this was Justified’s MO in the original show. Ava got away with everything and Winona’s stupid ass walked out on Raylan too without a scratch on her, cementing her as one of the dumbest characters of all time since there is no man in Harlan county like Raylan and any woman with sense would jump at the chance to be with him. But I digress.

I guess, overall, the words I would use for this revival are “unnecessary” and “unsatisfying.” It doesn’t feel like it needed to come back if this was the material it returned to in the end. Is it better than the last season? Eh. In some ways, yes. There are better characters here and Raylan isn’t acting like a complete psychopath willing to throw his badge and life away just to kill Boyd Crowder, but at the same time, this isn’t a worthy story for Raylan Givens, especially if like I suspect, they kill him off in the series finale. This was not the right choice for him and it seems to have fallen into the traps like the Dexter revival I mentioned above (keep in mind, I never watched Dexter, but I knew it had one of the most hated finales of all-time and I know about the revival’s reception only because my dad watched it over winter break one year and we chatted about how it went).

Is it possible the series finale wows me and fixes all the problems I had in episodes 1-7? Yes. Is it likely? No. My guess is that they left all the action in the final episode so it’s an incredibly bottom-heavy series with an unsatisfying conclusion. Rest assured, if they kill Raylan off after an incredibly lackluster season, I will simply go into denial like I did with the original final season, as I sadly have had to do with a lot of shows I used to love.

So what can we learn from this debacle?

A few things, really. First, don’t bring back a beloved character unless you have something relevant to say about them or about any sort of important subject matter that you want to write about. Second, if you are more interested in writing about the antagonist than the protagonist, then you need to establish that right out of the gate instead of leading people on to think the story is centered on the protagonist. Third, learn what scenes need to be elaborated on and what can get cut that won’t be detrimental to the overall story. Fourth, don’t be lazy and make a dumb protagonist so the antagonist can get away with everything; do the work of writing a competent antagonist and a competent protagonist equally. Because if you don’t do that, you end up with a trope that has a name I forget that has to do with Lex Luthor; don’t write your bad guy getting away with his crimes so often that it induces apathy within your audience because Status Quo is God. This trope refers to Lex Luthor as the main example of how a conflict between good and evil can get boring if the bad guy ALWAYS gets away with his crimes so that the work of fiction can continue to be made. We all know that Lex is never going to jail—not for anything serious that he’s done and not for any significant length of time if they do get him on something eventually—and so Superman defeating him time and time again can get old if you’re not adding any new dimensions to the struggle. Lex fared a little better in Superman: The Animated Series because Supes and Lex were engaged in, for lack of a better word, a cold war. Lex does a bunch of illegal, shady shit and Clark tries to stop it or tries to gather evidence to either put Lex away or destroy his chances at future crimes, and that worked for that show’s format. You have to balance it with victories and losses for both sides or your audiences will lose interest.

And frankly, that’s about what happened by the time I finished watching episode 7 of City Primeval. I’ve just lost interest in what they decided to focus on and this isn’t a return to form for Raylan Givens nor this writers’ room. But what can you expect when the last season was also a dried turd?

If nothing else, I’ll commend them for giving Raylan an age-appropriate, interesting love interest with whom he had actual chemistry. That’s the best thing I can say for City Primeval, personally. I guess we’ll see if they somehow buck the system and stick the landing, but my guess is I’ll be just as disappointed with this finale as I was with the original one, and that’s a damn shame considering the enormous talent of the cast in this mini-series.

Better luck next time, my long legged cowboy boyfriend.

“On this lonely road

Trying to make it home

Doin’ by my lonesome, pissed off

Who wants some?

See them long, hard times to come…”

Southern Social Commentary on FX’s Justified

Posted by :letitia.carelock@gmail.com On : July 11, 2020
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Category: Inspiration

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Like a lot of folks, being indoors more often due to the coronavirus sometimes leads one to rewatch TV shows to try and fill the hours. Instead of, you know, writing a novel or anything. *sweats nervously* So a couple weeks ago, I decided that I had a hankering for what used to be one of my favorite shows of all time, FX’s Justified (2010), starring the delicious Timothy Olyphant as the unforgettable US Deputy Marshal Raylan Givens.

Upon revisiting the show, and keep in mind, I hadn’t seen it since its disastrous final season in 2015 (which I in no way acknowledge except to tell you it doesn’t exist in my mind), I realized a whole bunch of very interesting things that I hadn’t noticed when the show was still premiering on TV. One of the biggest things I realized was that Justified is one of the only shows portraying Southern white men in such a way that it’s not buying into the very popular “oh, you poor Southern white man, your life is so hard, no one understands you but I do” that a lot of fiction has fallen prey to before. You would think that a show centered around conservative Southern white men would have lots and lots of problematic material, but in a fascinating twist, Justified doesn’t pander to that mentality. It’s shockingly amazing to be knee-deep in it, but yet it’s very clearly shown that the writers’ room does not sympathize with this demographic and in its own way, that’s pretty damn progressive.

ICYMI, Justified is about US Deputy Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant), who is the literal definition of a cowboy cop, all the way down to the snakeskin boots and an honest to God famous off-white cowboy hat. Raylan’s reckless ways reach a zenith when he confronts a mobster in Miami, whom he gave 24-hours to leave town or he would shoot him on sight. The mobster, Tommy Bucks, scoffs and doesn’t believe him when Raylan sits down at his table at a popular restaurant and tells him to either leave or die in his chair. The mobster pulls a gun on him and Raylan shoots him dead in front of everyone. Naturally, the shooting was justified (“Roll credits!”), but it lands him in so much trouble that his superior reassigns him to Kentucky, which is where Raylan is from. Raylan begrudgingly returns to Lexington, and subsequently, Harlan county, and continues kicking up an unholy amount of dust.

To give you the skinny, Justified only has three kinds of characters: lawmen, criminals, and victims. While this is a bit limiting, the show does an excellent job characterizing all three of these kinds of people over the course of the show. I bring it up because basically, any person who is not either a lawman or a victim in Harlan county is portrayed as a huge, steaming pile of racist crap.

But here’s where things get interesting.

For example, one thing that I never noticed when I used to watch this show is that every criminal we visit has a big fat honkin’ Confederate flag on the wall of his home or place of business. And I do mean every single one of them. There may be some blessed individual on the Internet who counted them up, but I kid you not, you see that wretched flag in every last episode of Justified. Therefore, you’d think that the show would pause to have one of those really frustrating conversations with conservative white Southerners that you see all the time, where the Southerner who owns the Confederate flag proceeds to explain why the Civil War wasn’t about slavery and it’s not racist to own it and it’s just them being proud of their heritage. (My sympathies to those of you, like me, who have sat through this explanation.)

Well, guess what? There is no such conversation throughout the entire six seasons of the show.

Now that gets you curious, doesn’t it? Why would a show that features the Confederate flag in every single episode not have a discourse about it?

Because the show does not mince words about how it feels about these racist pricks.

Justified makes no bones about the fact that these are nasty, uneducated, pea-brained simpletons. What’s more is that it doesn’t just take shots at trailer trash, either. It comes after the Southern elite racists as well. There’s an episode that I still think deserves so much credit for one of the best takedowns of the Neo Nazi movement that I’ve ever seen. Raylan and his boss Art Mullen are working on seizing the assets of a rich criminal who collects Hitler’s paintings, and they run into a man who is interested in buying them, but it turns out that they are fakes. Raylan and Art are immediately disgusted by both of these men, but the buyer insists that after he helps them cooperate in solving the case that Raylan come to see his collection of Hitler paintings. Well, cue the twist. The buyer’s father turned out to be part of the Nazi party, going so far as to doing some of Hitler’s dirty work directly at times. The buyer has spent his entire life accumulating wealth so that he can buy Hitler’s hard-to-find paintings one by one…and burn them. He has jars and jars of ashes in his office of Hitler’s paintings and he intends to find them all wherever they are and burn every single one until they’re all off the face of the Earth.

I mean, wow. That’s fantastic writing, if you ask me.

Now think about this for a second. Who is the key demographic for a show like Justified? Typically, it’s people who like westerns, right? Whether it’s spaghetti westerns or modern westerns, that’s generally who you assume would be watching a show like Justified, and yet this show is very anti-Confederacy and it makes it quite clear it has zero patience for anyone sympathizing with racists. For instance, in that same episode, the wife of the mobster whose assets are being seized is quite pretty and blonde—which is sadly one of Raylan’s weaknesses—and she and Raylan are talking for a while, pleasantly, maybe even flirting a little. Then the wife makes an anti-Semitic comment. Raylan is instantly turned off and abruptly leaves her company, and he makes it so clear to her that she even comments on it, whining that she thought he was “a good ole boy.”

Consider how much that flies in the face of who you’d think would like this show, and the balls it takes to make it so apparent. Most of the famous westerns of the bygone eras do not have very nice things to say about people of color due to the time period when they were made. Often, they portray the South as brave rebels who didn’t like to be told what to do by the North. It would be very easy for the writers of Justified to make Raylan a good ole boy, as the racist wife said, and yet he is shown to be staunchly against even the slightest hint of racist behavior by the criminals he apprehends or anyone in his presence.

In particular, US Deputy Marshal Rachel Brooks (Erica Tazel), is a young, gorgeous black woman and easily the most competent member of the marshal service in their office. She’s often at Raylan’s side apprehending criminals in Harlan county, which puts her in the middle of the usual racist bullshit. She even asks Raylan to come along during an assignment to help smooth things over because the moment the residents of Harlan county find out she’s a marshal, she’s a “black bitch.” The show does a good job with showing that Rachel knows how to handle herself—and boy, does she prove it on a few occasions—but that it’s tiresome for her to come up against that kind of a wall doing her job. Raylan agrees to help with no qualms at all because he understands how tedious and painful it is for her to put up with that while she’s working. It’s a great angle of solidarity that Raylan is using his handsome looks and white Southern charm to reduce the amount of harassment aimed in her direction. There’s also a more subtle thing I enjoyed, which is if anyone does say something racist to Rachel, Raylan is entirely intolerant of it and often tries to make sure they get their comeuppance if they’re stupid enough to mess with her. It’s a great understanding of how he chooses to be an ally to her, when he very well could hang her out to dry. They build a significant amount of trust and even a bit of affection for each other over the course of the show. Rachel also isn’t afraid to call him out on his shit and occasionally smacks some sense into him when he’s being ridiculous, which he often is. Rachel does end up being underused overall, but when we do see her, it’s made clear that she is by far the smartest, most likable woman on the show, and I think that is also pretty interesting all things considered.

The other rather excellent commentary on the white supremacists is none other than the infamous Boyd Crowder. Boyd Crowder is the series-long arch nemesis and frenemy of Raylan Givens. The two dug coal together as teenagers and have had a very hateful but friendly relationship with Raylan being on the side of the law, always trying to nail Crowder for his infinite list of crimes, and Crowder doing his absolute best to thwart Raylan’s attempts to land him in jail for good.

To be honest, if anyone made a list of the best written villains in the last 20 years, I’d happily throw Boyd Crowder on it. What’s great about Boyd Crowder as a villain is his progression from a loud, greedy Neo Nazi psycho into an insanely smart crime boss for Harlan county. Boyd starts out as one of those utterly perplexing Neo Nazis who uses Bible verses to insist the Bible wants the Jews dead and that people of color are all animals and the white man is supposed to rule them all. In truth, it’s just a smoke screen. Boyd is aware of the fact that the white supremacists LOVE to use the Bible as an excuse to be horrible pieces of shit, so they happily do his bidding because he parrots the things they want to hear. However, Boyd has a brush with death, finds religion again, but then loses his faith and decides to simply embrace his evil and crawl his way on top of the rogues gallery of Harlan county.

Boyd Crowder is certainly a cool villain, but while the show takes the time to flesh him out as a character, it never glorifies him or his lifestyle. Boyd is the perfect foil for Raylan, as he is a selfish, heartless bastard who will use anyone and anything to get what he wants. The show certainly shows off his skills and Walt Goggins utterly slays the performance itself, but at no point is there a Tyler Durden problem. For those who are unfamiliar, a lot of stupid men walked away from Fight Club completely missing the point, which is that while it’s not great to be controlled by society and suppress your Id, it’s also an incredibly stupid and reckless idea to give into your Id completely and let it control you. If you ever meet a guy who idolizes Tyler Durden, run in the opposite direction until you’re safely elsewhere.

Boyd is a monster. He’s a cool monster, but a monster nonetheless. Justified does not ever try to turn him into a Woobie or insist that you should like him as a person or want to be anything like him over the course of the show. One of my favorite moments is in the first season where Boyd tries to use an ambiguous Bible verse to insist that it’s about the Jews being “mud-people” and Raylan just stares at him like he’s an idiot and calmly tells him he’s just using the Bible to justify doing whatever the hell he wants regardless of what it means, which is a callout of epic proportions. My other favorite moment is that when confronted with someone who insists that times were best when Boyd used to run his Nazi “commandos” out of the church, Boyd confesses that he’s never even met a single Jew and was just regurgitating things his racist father and the people around him had instilled in him in order to get approval and procure the things he wanted. I mean, wow. Seldom do you see someone self-aware enough to admit they’re hating an unseen “enemy” just to fit in and get people to do what he wanted them to do.

In the end, what I’m getting to is the fact that Justified had some of the most unconventional writing in regards to white Southern culture. It actively called these people out on their shit and didn’t attempt to sympathize with them just so it could get better ratings or have appeal to that demographic. Most of the time you will see shows like Atlanta breaking down the fallacy of the Southern Confederate sympathizer, yet here, a show that knew its key demographic would likely be white men, they went for the jugular. I have to say that while Justified had a lot of problems before it ended, this was one of the best aspects of the show that I noted during the rewatch and I think it’s pretty commendable that the writing team decided to go against the urge to pander. To be honest, it’s one of the reasons that I like FX in general. They are very willing to go out on a limb and try something different or risky in the pursuit of a great story.

If you’re ever in the mood for cowboy shenanigans, I can give my highest recommendations for the first three seasons of Justified. Sadly, it begins to steadily decline in seasons four and five, and I personally tell people not to watch the final season unless they want to hate the show and the writers. I wish it ended better, but I believe it deserves credit where credit is due. In this day and age, there are a lot of writers rooms not willing to confront the unhealthy aspects of white Southern culture, and as a black woman who grew up in Georgia, I have to say that Justified’s writing in this regard was a breath of fresh air.

Cautionary Tale: FX’s Taboo

Posted by :letitia.carelock@gmail.com On : March 1, 2017
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Category: Book & Movie Reviews

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In my experience, writing a good story is like baking a cake.

You have to measure each ingredient carefully. You have to know what things taste good together and what to leave out. Put too much liquid and it won’t firm up. Don’t put enough, the cake is dry. Add too much sugar and it’s inedible. Don’t add enough and it’s bland and tasteless.

Finally, after you have a good story, you add your icing. For novels, icing can be the worldbuilding aspects, extra juicy scenes to pander to the fans, or any manner of things. In television, however, I would equate the icing to the acting and atmosphere of a story.

FX’s mini-series Taboo is like a dry cake with excellent frosting.

Naturally, spoilers ahead. 

Unfortunately, what I believe happens in instances like Taboo is that the writers got so wrapped up in the “mystery” of the show that they just flat-out refused to tell a story the way that people have been doing it for thousands of years, because for some reason, they thought they knew better. We’ve all seen shows, movies, or books of the like, where it’s so clear that the author wants to lead you around by the nose and never see a twist coming that they actually fail storytelling in general.

You see, Taboo has a terribly interesting premise, and it has strong dialogue delivered by an incredibly talented cast. I fully admit that I am a Tom Hardy fangirl, but it’s true that I gave this show a chance because it had the potential to be unlike anything else on network television these days. Hell, FX is one of my favorite channels for that reason. They like to take risks and explore the worlds outside of the boring lineup of every other channel with its shows only about doctors, lawyers, or cops. Furthermore, the cinematography is Emmy-worthy, and that’s saying something considering the show is set in Crapsack World 1800’s where everything is dirty, cold, wet, and diseased.

Still, this is what happens sometimes when you get big name directors like Ridley Scott who are so concerned with making something unsolvable that they lose the entire reason why we sat down to watch Taboo in the first place.

Let’s start with the big man himself, James Keziah Delaney. Is his part well-acted? Absolutely. Tom’s using his A-game and he’s given us a heavy, disturbing, intriguing performance as Delaney, who is just as batshit insane as a man can possibly get, and is so far into the antagonist role that you could easily argue he is a villain protagonist. Over the course of the show, we really are not given much in the way of redeeming qualities. At the most, we see he has a slight fondness for the madam’s daughter Winter and he has a slight attachment for his father’s servant Brace, but he is portrayed as basically a step below full on evil. He takes Anti-Hero to a whole new level, and it’s the first mistake that the show made: you cannot root for a man who is almost completely aligned with the villain, and so you never grow attached to him, therefore meaning that his fate is ultimately pointless.

As I mentioned before, basic storytelling means that you introduce a character, introduce their motivations, glance over their background in order to help the audience understand them, and then you put them on a journey.

Well, what the hell is James’ motivation? They never give us a full picture of who he is as a man, despite how much time we’ve spent with him. The writers threw us a few crumbs, but there is no payoff for who James Delaney is and why he does what he does. For example, most storytellers would make this a revenge story based around how the East India Company killed James’ father. We would assume as much, but we’re shown that James doesn’t have that much loyalty to his father and isn’t broken up at finding out he was killed for the Nootka land.

Well, maybe it’s about James’ mother, who was clearly a Native of some sort. Maybe she’s the reason he’s fighting the company to go to Nootka and maybe rediscover his roots. Nope. They never go into who his mother was, what she did, why she did it, how it affected him, or if he actually has any supernatural powers. They tease at it constantly and never address it, and it’s worse because it could have been one of the most interesting concepts of the entire show. Once more, it’s because the writers think it’s cool to keep the audience guessing and keep them in the dark, but all it does is make you impatient and frustrated that they’re jerking you around for the sake of jerking you around. James’ mother should have a larger impact on understanding who he is and where he came from, but ultimately she matters about as much as James’ father, which is not at all.

Over and over again, James makes decisions that can’t be predicted or absorbed by the audience because the show constantly holds us at arms’ length in order to deliver “ooh, aah, what a twist!” moments. I don’t know why they seem to think this is enough to keep our butts in the chairs. Without a reason to care or understand or sympathize with James, why should we stick around for a few cheap, paltry writing tricks?

Let’s say for argument’s sake that maybe it’s not about understanding James Delaney. Fine. What about Zilpha or Lorna? Nope. We’re not given any motivations for either of them. Zilpha is living under the greasy boot of her stupid abusive husband until the last two or three episodes. We don’t know how she ended up with him. We don’t know why she puts up with his abuse when she clearly has some kind of self-esteem and thoughts independent of him. Was her husband always an abusive creep or did James’ reappearance change him? Sure, it’s satisfying when she stabs his bitch ass and he dies knowing that she sent his sorry butt to the afterlife, but then the show immediately ruins it by letting her story unceremoniously end with suicide. What? Are you kidding me? Why did James doggedly pursue her, to the point where he was giving her wet dreams, and then just randomly drop her on her ass? They never explain why he just cut her off and then she just dies for no reason. What was the point of telling that story in the first place if there is no pay off?

Alright, then let’s focus on Lorna. Maybe she was meant to be the focus. Nope. No dice. Lorna shows up all proud and arrogant like she’s hot shit in a champagne glass, but she then proceeds to just take up space as the Token Vagina of the group. She contributes absolutely nothing to the story until the season finale when she exonerates James from the murder of Winter—which, by the way, no one was investigating and he was just stomping around London free as a bird in spite of this—but even then that became a moot point because James was escaping London altogether and Winter’s mother dies in the finale. Again, what was the point of this character? They never show us anything about her marriage to James’ father, if it was even legit, or if she knew all along that attaching herself to him would give her Nootka, or why she wanted Nootka to begin with considering she was just an actress. How could she sail to America and expect not to be instantly killed upon arriving? Or was she just going to sell Nootka to the highest bidder? We, as the audience, cannot answer any of these questions, and that is a huge sign that this story is sour.

There are so many points in this show where there is no pay off. It’s just sloppy. For example, we later see that James and Goddard did file the account of the Influence’s sinking and gave it to Chichester, but then James just murders Stuart Strange, who is the reason why Chichester wanted justice in the first place. Stuart is dead and therefore cannot pay for his crime in the justice system. Perhaps it means the destruction or at least the seizure of the East India Trading Company, but those two actions are at odds with each other in terms of the story. You could argue that it shows that James has at least some common decency, but since we still don’t know what’s going on inside his head, it’s not satisfying.

To me, Taboo could have been a delicious cake with delicious frosting, and instead, it is a dry cake with fantastic frosting. Most of the time, you want it to be bad frosting on a good cake because you can simply scrape the frosting off and eat the cake, but Taboo is at its core an unstable story wobbling because the cook was so busy trying to be Avant Garde that he just forgot the right ingredients and the right measurements.

I must admit that I’m not entirely sure if I’ll be back if FX orders another season. It’s extremely clear that the people in that writers’ room just want to dick around instead of doing their job and telling a story so that we care about the characters we’ve spent so much time with. I suppose I’ll have to mull it over and decide if it’s worth it for another go at an extremely overcooked cake with poor flavoring, but excellent frosting.

Maybe if Tom Hardy shares it with me…

Things Justified Taught Me About Writing

Posted by :letitia.carelock@gmail.com On : January 19, 2015
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Category: Things X Taught Me About Writing

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fx-s-justified-renewed-for-fourth-season

If you’re not watching Justified, you need to reevaluate your life goals. It is by far one of the best, most consistently good shows on television, and after six awesome seasons (including the one starting this week), it’s finally saying goodbye. For that reason, I’m pouring one out to my long-legged, drawling, whip-smart, deathly sarcastic, eternally troubled badass modern cowboy, Marshal Raylan Givens.

First, a brief introduction: Justified tells the tale of Raylan (Timothy Olyphant), a Kentucky-born U.S. marshal who is a living, breathing modern cowboy. He was chasing down criminals in Florida before he faced off with a crime boss in a crowded restaurant. The crime boss pulled his gun and Raylan shot him in full view of the public, prompting a huge investigation that got him into so much trouble he was reassigned to his hometown. Harlan County, the area where his new jurisdiction covers, is absolutely teeming with all kinds of criminals from prostitution rings to drug dealers. Raylan is put under the supervision of Art Mullen (Nick Searchy), and works alongside fellow Marshals Rachel Brooks (Erica Tazel) and Tim Gutterson (Jacob Pitt), whom he has friction with at first but they soon get along.

Meanwhile, things start to get heated when Boyd Crowder (Walt Goggins) blows up a church and makes trouble for his former brother’s wife, Ava Crowder (Joelle Carter) when he finds out she killed him with a shotgun in his own home. Raylan and Boyd grew up together as teenagers, so Raylan is assigned to get him under control, kill him, or bring him in. Raylan’s life also gets even more tangled up as he crosses paths with his former wife Winona (Natalie Zea), a court stenographer, who remarried but they both still show signs of being attracted to each other.

Sound juicy enough for ya? Well, let’s dive in. Spoilers ahead, as always.

Sharp dialogue can be the most effective way to get your work noticed. Justified has a lot of unique things going for it, but what I’ve always considered to be this show’s most valuable asset is the dialogue. The stuff that comes out of these characters’ mouths is nothing short of genius. When Raylan, Art, Rachel, and Tim get in a room together, you don’t need violent criminals to have a good time. These four engage in the most intensely awesome snarkfests you will see in your natural born life. The relationships they’ve built over the years make for some of the best scenes you have the privilege of watching, especially Art and Raylan, who are equally exasperated with each other but still see the value of one another. If you need the highlights, check out the Crowning Moment of Funny page on Tvtropes.

It’s more than just humor, though. Justified has made a name for itself by carving out beautifully intricate characters through words alone. Boyd Crowder would be just like any other drug dealing crime boss if it weren’t for that legendary silver tongue and trademark drawl. He’s constantly cool under pressure and unlike 80% of the criminal underbelly of Harlan county, he uses his brain to get out of scrapes more than he uses a gun.

Similarly, Raylan’s biggest asset is that he just flat out pays attention and listens to the things around him. That is why he’s such an unbelievable marshal who nearly always gets his man. He knows how to manipulate bad guys and how to either talk them down or trick them into giving him the info he needs.

This is tricky for writers. Every author, and aspiring author, has strengths and weaknesses. Some of us are awesome at dialogue. Others are awesome at descriptions, diction, spinning whimsical plots, or creating imaginative worlds. Stick to what you’re good at, but also remember that great dialogue from your characters can set them apart, whether it’s humorous or poignant or terrifying or heartwarming. It also adds extra layers to their personality if they have a particular speech pattern or a quirk, like how in my series Belial insists on calling Jordan “my pet” just to work her nerve, and gives these grand overblown Hannibal Lecter-esque speeches just because he likes the sound of his own voice. Make the words coming out of their mouths matter and make them work for you, not against you.

 

Know the durability of your villains. One of the things that I’ve always loved about Justified is that they always pick a season-long villain to antagonize the marshals. This is a brilliant tactic because it allows us to get the full scope of someone without allowing them to drag along forever like Percy from Nikita or Abbadon from Supernatural. We get to see what kind of threat the villains present, why they need to be stopped, what their strengths and weaknesses are, and what their hubris is if they have one (which they typically do because they are human.)

My personal favorite villain thus far has been Mags Bennett (Margo Martindale) because for me, she’s the most layered and three-dimensional villain of the show. Mags actually had good sides to her, even though we find out she’s incredibly ruthless and scary. Hell, Mags was so amazing the role won Martindale an Emmy, and for good reason. She was expertly used and executed, and by far the best female character in the show’s entire run.

Conversely, Justified is a bit guilty of overusing their villains too. Dickie Bennett (Jeremy Davies), Mags’ wretched son, is still alive and kicking when he wore out his welcome by the end of season two. He’s a despicable coward, but yet he’s somehow managed to hold on to his life despite Raylan having every single reason to wipe that slime off the face of the earth. Thankfully, though, Dickie was downgraded to a minor character in the recent seasons, so while his presence still induces headaches, it’s tolerable.

Managing your villains properly is a hard trick to master as an author. You can’t look at it on a case-by-case basis. You have to unfurl your villain like a scroll and consider both the short and long term effects of their presence in the narrative. If you make their presence too short, then readers question why they were there in the first place. If you make their presence too long, then readers can get fatigued with them. I can freely admit one of the biggest struggles in writing the upcoming Black Parade novel The Holy Dark is that I had a villain who just wouldn’t fall into the category of major or minor character. It took me forever to figure it out because there were so many possibilities. It’s important to remember that nothing bogs a story down faster than a boring impervious villain who lasts longer than they should. You have to know when to fold ‘em.

 

Make your characters earn their keep. Alright, I’m going to get a little salty for this lesson—I f*@king hate Ava Crowder. I won’t launch into my 3,000 word essay about why, but if you’re curious enough, watch the following video (skip ahead to 12:35). I’m sure people would debate with me why she’s supposedly a good character, but the number one reason I can’t stand Ava is because she isn’t an independent character who pulls her own weight. Almost everything in this show just conveniently gets Ava out of a fix rather than her getting herself out of her own problems.

For instance, her introduction is killing Boyd’s brother with a shotgun after years of abuse. Look, fine, I understand that because domestic violence is pretty much the worst, but he was an unarmed man sitting at a dinner table eating and she shot him. In damn near any other case, Ava’s ass would have gone to jail, but no, she doesn’t. She gets off scot-free, which irritated me when I began the show, but I let it slide with the hope that she would give me a definitive reason why she was taking up time on my TV screen. She then enters a borderline creepy relationship with Boyd, which again annoyed me but whatever she clearly had bad taste in men to begin with, but what tears it is that Ava is basically just coasting off of Boyd’s reputation. She’s his lackey, except she gets to sleep with him and pretend that she’s his lieutenant. They keep up this disgustingly long pretense of being in love and wanting to buy a home and get married until finally the season four finale has Ava being apprehended in possession of a dead body and she’s sent to jail. Finally, Ava will prove she’s worth a damn, right?

lana-kane nope

Ava gets in jail and immediately gets help from Boyd, even though it later backfires. Then she gets mad that he can’t find a way to help her, so she breaks up with him and starts to learn the pecking order in the prison. It turns out they have a drug ring inside the prison and the guards are in on it in exchange for sex. The girls play along, but Ava—who is such a hypocrite because she ran a whorehouse herself before getting in jail—is too good to trade sex for status and rebuffs a guard. She tries to make a deal with the local nurse to get the product in and out of the jailhouse, but the guard she rejected frames her for attacking him. She is later saved by someone Boyd hired to watch over her. Then, Ava decides to take out the head of the drug ring so she can be the queen bee and it turns out it’s some elderly woman. And they get in a fight. And the elderly woman kicks Ava’s ass for a while before she finally stabs her to death. The woman’s followers suspect Ava and she’s all but tied her own noose because half the prison now wants her dead.

And then the entire season-long subplot is rendered pointless because Raylan gets her out of jail so she can tattle on Boyd to finally send him up the river. That’s right. After an entire season of her skating by on pure dumb luck, she is Deus Ex Machina’d out of trouble. Yep.

There is little worse than making someone a main character and then letting them constantly get away with everything with few relevant consequences. People are flawed, yes, but bailing a character out over and over again is the quickest way to make your readers dislike them. Not everyone needs to be a badass, but they all need to earn their keep and solve as many problems as they create. This is part of what authors mean when they say “kill your darlings.” It refers to more than getting rid of pieces of your work that you like but isn’t relevant to the overall story. It means push your characters off that pedestal they are on and force them to be worth your readers’ time. You can’t babysit them. Make them matter.

Don’t forget to just plain have fun. I am about to introduce the most brilliant moment ever put to television thanks to Justified. If you take nothing else away from this blog post, then you must do me the one favor of indulging me while I set up the best scene in the entire series, and in any series if you ask me.

In our fifth season, we’re introduced to Dewey Crowe’s family—a bunch of horrible, ignorant, slimy, back-stabbing guttersnipes who come up from Florida after they find out Dewey has come into some money thanks to suing the marshal service (long story.) They pressure and bully Dewey into sharing the wealth, and in doing so, cross Raylan and the marshals’ paths as they try to get a foothold on the crime syndicate in Harlan county. The Crowes are led by Darryl Crowe (Michael Rappaport), and consist of his sister Wendy (Alicia Witt) and his unbelievably stupid brother Danny (A.J Buckley).

Danny has been an incredible thorn in the side of everyone he meets for just being stupid as a bucket of shrimp, a coward, and a bully all in one. He bullies Wendy’s son, Kendal, in front of one of their dangerous allies Jean Baptiste (Edi Gathegi), who challenges him to either leave the kid alone or face off with him. Danny shoots him in the back and then threatens to kill Kendal if he tells anyone, and then tries to kill Kendal after he accidentally lets Danny’s beloved pit bull run off and get hit by a car.

At the end of the season, Raylan finally tracks Danny down to try and get him to lead him to Darryl. Danny decides to have a showdown with sharpshooter Raylan by setting up the 21-foot rule, a legend where a person with a knife is good enough to take someone with a gun within 21 steps of each other.

The result is the most glorious thing ever created ever. Please enjoy.

Reportedly, this scene was so amazing that Timothy Olyphant himself simply could not stop laughing in between takes because it is by far the most satisfying villain death ever made. When this happened live, my mother and I both jumped straight up off the couch and gave it a standing ovation for over a minute. You just have to have fun when opportunities like this present themselves. Justified went for it and they knocked it straight out of the park. True, you do need a bit more context to fully appreciate why the aforementioned scene is perfection, but nothing beats just having fun in your work.

No matter what the genre, it’s important to have fun with your writing. You have to love it. You have to put yourself inside it and make your readers turn those pages, the way that Justified is so good it practically demands me to watch it. Be audacious. Be bold. Do risky things or edgy things and make the pay off so great that people are excited to share it with each other. Even if you’re not Stephen King, you have the ability to gain readership by making your work an experience they cannot get elsewhere.

I’m super nervous about how Justified will end—after all, this is FX we’re talking about and they don’t pull their punches—but I’m so glad for the ride. It truly has been a show that no one can touch. It has its own voice and style and I will miss it sorely after it’s gone. If you’re curious, tune in Tuesdays at 10 o’clock pm EST. See you, cowboy.