A thread for JUSTIFIED, a TV show on FX starring Timothy Olyphant

o it nails the south and southerners, but i'm not sure you can call those ppl 'ppl' really amirite lg? and yeah, if there's one thing you can say about justified it's that it 'has no tension'.

as a character i prefer ava to wynona (wynona was such a pain in the ass this season, guys) but natalie zea is ridiculously beautiful.

oh right, i don't like this show cos i am not from kentucky and cos i apparently have no inner life. sounds reasonable guys. glad we all appreciate subjectivity.

i didn't say that! i do think the show is stylized in an elmore leonard way, but that doesn't make the characters flat.

after raylan settled in during the first season as morally ambiguous but unbothered by that, it seemed that boyd was the much more interesting character. but i have to confess that i only half-watched some of the latter half of the second season, so i couldn't totally track boyd through it.

i said it, nothing i've seen here contradicts it

damn, a justified-style showdown appearing right on this very thread

please no one start shooting

no tension here

are you from kentucky? if so i have to warn you i don't recognise you as a human being.

feel like i could cut this tension with a knife

are you from kentucky?

nb i grew up in ireland, the most cosmopolitan country in the world. please don't talk to me.

this is like justified meets the commitments... on ilx

in an elevator

Wynona is >:(

She is v pretty, but >:(

LG, you are entitled to your opinion but I'm afraid I may have to shoot you regardless. Also, I am not from Kentucky.

i can't believe no one wants to have a serious argument with me about which is more feelingsy, mad men or justified.

Mad Men is very distant, everyone pretending to be chill while drinking scotches in their closet & fucking anything that moves.

Justified WAY more feelingsy. Also ppl get mad, shoot stuff. And drink out in the open. Much more productive. Raylan & the little girl made me cry like 10 times this season!

ah i find the little girl thing so cartoonish and cheesey. don reading "meditations in an emergency" is the epitome of how well mad men does the emotional stuff and it's not just directly driven by the events of that 40 minute episode. justified is just "someone died i'm mad", "someone is in danger i'm worried" etc...it's just a great police show week on week...with no overarching plot worth thinking about. yes there's tension in each individual episode but seriously don't really wonder about what will happen raylan. all that plus "oh he managed to fire a shot and kill the guy again" at star trek levels of "it probably won't work but if we can just reroute the...oh shit it worked, grand, see you next week."

did you find helen getting killed cartoonish and cheesy >:[

i guess this is impossible to argue about, especially since i don't really get mad men

"just" a great police show!!! what's better than a great police show?

who is helen? what exposition of raylan's relationship with her was there at any point? it's all just telling not showing...

she protected raylan from his dad when he was a kid! he clearly worships/worshiped her!

i don't know in a way i think you're right, we get told that about raylan and helen, but that's mostly because the show is centered around raylan and he's not really in touch with a lot of his feelings, so the only one that usually gets expressed is rage. but you still know he has them; it's in the performance in an oblique way. i agree with whoever said that boyd is the more feelingsy character.

and the feelings are archetypal father/son stuff, so i guess i can see how you could find them cliched but cliches are true sometimes!

just feels like it's all backstory...there's so little writing/acting that shows you this, you're just supposed to believe it cos it's a plotline. too much happens on a week to week basis to be resolved that week for there to be any decent character arch imo.

i agree with whoever said upthread that boyd's "i've renounced crime"/"oh wait i'm a criminal again" was really kinda silly too. again it just never really explored why or who he is.

sorry to rag on this show, i'll be watching s3 as well, it just doesn't really blow me away.

*arc

okay but the writing is awesome, right? so good!

good episode plots and some good dialogue, okay characters and general story, imo.

on some level i think of elmore leonard joints as opportunities for great dialogue, i guess this doesn't really bother me. but the dialogue is great because of the force of personality behind it.

xp

lol now i'm just mad at you again

aylon wears the cowboy hat because he hated his life and wanted to build a new one

and because it fits iirc

ireland, the most cosmopolitan country in the world

mm

and because it fits iirc

― where ilxor ends and markers begins (history mayne), Wednesday, June 29, 2011 7:54 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

well yeah exactly, raylon doesnt understand himself at all and tries to pretend things have no meaning is one of the themes of the show

but to everyone else his motivations are blindingly obvious. which is why he didnt want to go back to kentucky

well he sure fucked that one up. when is he gonna go back to florida?

now he kinda likes it is the thing, a journey of self discovery

would be funny if next season was all abt him being a shooting instructor tho

i would watch that show, tbh

i think i lack critical distance from this show because of the long, loving shots of tim olyphant

i am pretty sure it rules, though

it TOTALLY rules. LG is crazy.

Also re the whole 'formula' argument: Mad Men is just a formulaic as Justified. Mad Men is an uber-stylish soap opera! It's SO soapy it's ridiculous. I love Mad Men, don't get me wrong. But it's as formulaic a soap opera as Justified is a cop show.

imo mad men is def subtler/orignialer/better than justified but like its better than most shows so thats really not damning - and as i said upthread justfied is totally knowing re its use of formula, i mean it def tries to have it both ways, but it works out p well imo

I guess it's just do you like hats/guns or hats/brooding :)

At the end of the day, it's all hats. Surely we can come together on that.

they stopped wearing hats in mad men tbh :(

oh shit, you're right. I just always remember it with hats.

can we talk more about Timothy Olyphant? and that cute sniper guy that's his sidekick?

a perfect getaway is p good