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?
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.
Southern Social Commentary on FX’s Justified
Category: Inspiration
Tags:fx, justified, justified fx, raylan givens, social commentary, timothy olyphant
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.