Oylphant is Big Gun in FX's New Justified

FX’s new original series, Justified, introduces us to Raylan Givens, a U.S. Marshal, prone to wearing a cowboy hat and giving bad guys 24-hours to get out of town, then shooting them dead when they don’t believe lawmen who issue such warnings still exist in modern times.
In the show’s pilot, which airs Tuesday night, Givens loses his cushy position in Miami after one very public execution. “He pulled first,” says Givens, played by Timothy Olyphant, justifying his action.
Givens a character originally found in the writings of Elmore Leonard, is sent home to coal country in Harlan County, Ky., where the Marshal service has a small field office and he knows many of the good women and bad men.
The show seems to have a simple charm, built around what seems to be a simple code followed by Givens. But being surrounded by people who remember him when is sure to make his life more complicated.
Even in the pilot, Givens has a relationship with the bad guy, a white supremacist who loves blowing things up, played with aplomb by Walton Goggins, formerly with FX’s first great show, The Shield. Maybe because the two dug coal together back in the day, when Givens shoots him in the chest, the bullet lands millimeters from his heart.
How close does this series come to hitting a bull’s eye? Reviews were a bit mixed.
Mary McNamara of the L.A. Times found the fact that Givens knows everyone in his new territory a bit more than coincidental.
“Now, Kentucky may not be the largest state in the union, but it is home to more than 4 million souls, so this is pushing it, even for a television pilot,” she wrote. “Still, it’s as refreshing as a glass of sweet tea to watch a show set somewhere outside the traditional East Coast/West Coast metropolitan areas, and writer/executive producer Graham Yost (Leonard serves as executive producer as well) certainly has a musical ear — the easy rhythm of the dialogue makes it difficult to dwell on things like plot contrivance.”
McNamara adds “fine character actors abound, playing people on the rural edges, but it’s the main character and Olyphant’s performance that lift the sometimes labored plot lines and carry them over the finish line. Like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Givens is a man fighting not only his past but his present. His sense of justice, and his dead quiet ability to enforce it, are all part of a masculine ideal last seen riding off into the sunset with John Wayne and Gary Cooper.”
But Tom Shales writing in the Washington Post says that Justified doesn’t have the edge of past FX series.
“The first impression made by the series is particularly disappointing because it was produced for the FX network, where standards aren’t artfully high but where the specialty is edgy, cryptic, potty-mouthed dramas that mutilate the old proverbial envelope (Nip/Tuck, Damages). Although Justified qualifies as cryptic, and its mouth is plenty potty, it definitely lacks edge, the most important quality of the three.”
Mr. Shales says that “At times, Justified veers close to parody — a parody of itself or a spoof of taciturn heroes who speak softly (albeit at length) and carry big guns, and maybe have a hankerin’ for the school marm. In this case, however, Marshal Givens doesn’t meet the school marm and so will apparently settle for the Village Slut. That’s somehow what Justified is — not tawdry, really, nor sleazy, but just slutty — the kind of show not to take home to meet the family.
In the New York Times, Mike Hale also seems to be a bit disappointed.
“For those of us already disposed to like shows about men with guns and secrets and senses of humor, Justified is in many ways an upgrade over what’s currently available; it’s Burn Notice with more soul. But in other ways, the people behind the show — including Graham Yost, the executive producer who developed it and wrote the pilot — have not solved the problem of how to translate Mr. Leonard’s style, intact, to the screen,” Mr. Hale writes.
“Mr. Leonard’s stories may not be full of dramatic incident, but they still proceed at an urgent, if not breakneck, pace. Justified, on the other hand, can feel so low-key that even the crisis points — like the repeated warnings, passed back and forth among Givens and various bad seeds, to leave town within 24 hours or be shot on sight — drift past without making much of an impression. It feels as if the attention that should have gone to the storytelling all went to the atmosphere and the repartee,” he writes.
As for Mr. Olyphant, “he doesn’t do anything wrong, exactly — his Givens is believably smart and courageous, and he has a nice touch with the sometimes oblique laugh lines. (Bad guy, pointing gun: “Marshal? Like in Gunsmoke?” Givens, cowering: “More like The Fugitive.”), Hale writes. “But he underplays so consistently that Givens, with his mixture of gunman’s swagger and lawman’s tortured conscience, doesn’t come alive the way he should. The sparkle isn’t there.”
I think it’s worth checking out. What do you think?