Does the woman at the coffee shop notice my wry stoicism and subtle east Kentucky accent when I ask her to leave a little room, darlin’, for milk? Do strangers on the train see my confident amble through the doors and feel assured as I stand, watchful, with my hand poised just above my belt, ready if anyone tries anything funny? Has my wife made note of my newly squinty manner or worried why I’ve been staying up so late, hunched over my laptop? It’s no big deal: I’m just shopping online for the perfect Stetson.
It’s tough for a no-shit cowboy to fit into this modern world, but Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, played by Timothy Olyphant, manages just fine. He’s back, in the fifth season of the FX series “Justified,” which premièred on Tuesday night. Raylan is perhaps too quick with his gun, but it is always pointed at the right people. He’s not a contemporary anti-hero, but a new-fashioned cowboy hero. More specifically, he’s my hero—in the way that men in white hats used to be heroes to little boys. (Never mind that the cowboy myths have been debunked, and that I’m no longer a little boy.) The only difference is that his appeal comes not from his quick draw but from his quick wit. As I’ve raced through back episodes of “Justified” over the past few weeks, trying to get current to this season, the voice of Raylan Givens, always ready with the perfect bourbon-braised bon mot, has been moseying around in my brain. “I’m either gonna put him in prison, or in the ground,” Raylan says. “If I was gonna kill you, you wouldn’t have even turned around.” I wish I knew some low-life thugs who needed to be set straight.
As is customary, Raylan gets off the best lines in the season’s first episode. On a visit to a brothel now owned by his scummy, hapless foil, Dewey Crowe, he presses him for information: “If I start arresting girls, how’s that for business? You and Wade the only two pussies in this whorehouse.” (The dropped verb “are” in the second sentence is what sells it.) Both Dewey and the other guy, Wade, have tried to kill Raylan in past seasons, but he mostly seems amused rather than angry. Still, as he leaves, he shoots a couple of holes in Dewey’s above-ground swimming pool. Later, at the end of the episode, he tells his ex-wife, while video chatting with her and his baby daughter, “I bet you were gorgeous from the jump.” (Raylan manages, against long odds, to make even Skyping seem cool.)
This season, Raylan appears poised to square off against Dewey’s family, swamp folk of South Florida, who, like many of Raylan’s past foes, have leaky tattoos and patchy, hillbilly-chic haircuts. The Crowes, having been run out of the illegal sugar-importing business, are searching out a new revenue stream, and turn their eyes to cousin Dewey, who just came into three hundred thousand dollars as part of a government settlement, paid out mostly because of Dewey’s run-ins with Raylan. That money seems likely to bring the rest of the Crowe clan to Raylan’s hometown of Harlan, Kentucky, where Boyd Crowder (the great Walton Goggins, looking more crazed than ever) continues his criminal enterprises.
“Justified” is almost preposterously violent—in the season debut alone handfuls of men are shot, one is tortured offscreen with a chain saw, another is stabbed by his brothers, and still another is brained by the butt of a handgun. I may be forgetting a few others. Oh, and a chicken, strung up on a line, gets eaten by a gator. But despite all of this grisliness, “Justified” should properly be called a comedy. (Tuesday’s episode featured guest spots by the comedic actors David Koechner, as a fellow marshal, and Dave Foley and Will Sasso as the meanest Canadians anyone’s ever met.) The stakes of the show, despite its violence, have always felt a bit low—perhaps because, as with most cowboy stories, we know who the good guy is, and we know that he’s going to survive every shootout. This probably limits the show’s emotional potency and narrative potential—critics have rightly noted that “Justified” occasionally muddles in a place between serial and “serious” longer-arc drama—but it is also what makes it singular. Its cowboy star is always smirking, as if life, in all its desperations and bloody travails, is more a joke than a tragedy.
In this way, “Justified” continues to be a fine tribute to Elmore Leonard, who created the Raylan character, and who was involved in the making of the show before his death, in August. Leonard’s novels are less interested in morality than in style. His bad guys rarely have sympathetic stories—they are crooks because some people in this world are crooks—but they are often quite appealing, because they are eccentric and colorful, and they say funny and interesting things. In Leonard’s world, you can tell a good guy, meanwhile, not by traditional ethical virtues necessarily, but by the way he carries himself, and how he is able to outspeak his enemies. The showrunner and writer Graham Yost has kept this idea at the center of “Justified,” making it more stagey than realistic, perhaps at the expense of it ever becoming truly respectable. Despite all the gun shots, the real wars are the ones of words. And as long as Raylan Givens always gets the last one, the world will be a better place.
