Justified

I've just finished watching the first season of Justified, from 2010. It's a series that airs on FX that is now heading for its sixth and last season, but I hadn't seen any of it until now.

I was attracted to it for some basic reasons. First, it's based on a character created by the late great Elmore Leonard. Raylan Givens, who appeared in the Leonard novels Pronto and Riding the Rap, is a U.S. Marshal who, as the series begins, is based in Miami. But after he shoots and kills a drug cartel member, he is reassigned back to his home state, Kentucky, which he is not happy about.

The second reason to love this series is that Givens is played by Timothy Olyphant, who was so good as Seth Bullock in Deadwood. Givens has some similarities to Bullock--they are both by the book law-and-order guys, tough as nails, don't waste words, and are quick with a gun. Givens is a bit more louche, though. Not only does he leave quite a trail of dead, but he can't keep is hands off a witness, which ends up getting his number one nemesis sprung from jail. As played by Olyphant, he is a kind of update of the classic hero, typically played by Gary Cooper.

I warmed to the show as it went along. The first few episodes are stand-alone and fairly routine, but as the season progressed it boiled down to a running storyline that paralleled two father-son relationships. Givens' father, Arlo (Raymond J. Barry) is a longtime crook, something of an embarrassment to Givens. In a bit of a twist, the disgusted son has rejected his father by hewing the straight and narrow.

The other relationship is between the Crowders. Boyd Crowder (an excellent Walton Goggins) is Givens' old friend, but, as the season begins, is running meth in the Dixie Mafia. Givens shoots him, but doesn't kill him, and Goggins has a jailhouse conversion. But Givens (as well as the audience) can't ever be sure Boyd is on the level or not. His father, Bo (M.C.Gainey) leaves prison and attempts to back to running the drug market, but Boyd tries to put a stop to it. This all leads to a terrific showdown between both sets of father and sons in the last episode.

The series, created by Graham Yost, is credited to being based on Leonard's story "Fire in the Hole," but I recognized other sources. One episode is a very truncated adaptation of Riding the Rap, and an episode with Stephen Root as a gun-happy judge is loosely based on Leonard's novel Maximum Bob. Leonard wrote mostly about south Florida and Detroit, though, so this Kentucky setting seems fresh. At its heart, its about criminals who aren't that smart and heroes who are flawed but stalwart.

A few things are handled a little clumsily, such as Givens' relationship with the witness (Joelle Carter) and his ex-wife (Natalie Zea). A few characters disappear after a few episodes. But some episodes are drolly funny, such as one about how Givens loses his beloved cowboy hat and how he gets it back.

I will definitely take a look at the subsequent seasons.