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

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

• i also think the sniper is v handsome

he sneaks up on you, but yes. super handsome. and he has a lovely drawl. Apparently he was the lead in Eurotrip? Which hurts my head. I so don't want to see that movie.

ive seen eurotrip at least lol 3 times, it was on cable a lot, its p hilar in its own way, hes not the lead but he has a big part - scotty doesnt know scotty doesnt know dont tell scotty --matt damon

hmm

this is not really the type of movie you want to watch 'on purpose'

jus fyi

I had a feeling

local garda otm in this thread -- justified is a fine show with flashes of greatness (and i would rather watch it than mad men, but that doesn't matter because i'd rather watch almost anything over mad men), but it's kind of, i dunno, basic. last season totally stepped up but the reviews going 'omg it's the wire for the appalachians!' were just ridic.

Mostly everything that gets compared to 'The Wire' is wishful-thinking/shameless hyperbole. Brits did it hardcore with the Danish The Killing.

re: Mad Men being a soap vs. this: Mad Men is so character based that the plots hinge not on what actually happens but how the characters react to them. That's what we're watching for and that's what makes it great. Justified doesn't quite do that in the same way: Lots of viewer interest relies on what Mags and her clan is up to/how Raylon and Winona are going to get out of the evidence box fiasco/whatever happened in the few stand-alones. It's just the way the show is designed, and at the moment, that can only allow for so much of the character development that a lot of people think makes shows like Mad Men great. If they were to try a predominately two-person episode (perhaps a bottle, perhaps not) like "The Suitcase" or "The Fly", I'm not sure how well it would work. Though I'd love to see them try.

some dude, no offense but you like rizzoli and isles.

Just because they don't quote fuckin' Socrates or make meta commentaries on the state of domestic politics via meth labs doesn't diminish it one bit.

this argument's getting way too snooty for my liking.

basic.

PAH.

PAH I SAY.

I love Justified! I'm just saying that it should be approached differently from shows like Mad Men, and shouldn't be compared.

ireland, the most cosmopolitan country in the world

mm

might want to get your sarcasm radar rewired.

i agree the comparison thing is kinda stupid, i didn't really go down that road to begin with, it was foisted on me!

Mad Men is so character based that the plots hinge not on what actually happens but how the characters react to them.

but there's still a fairly good plot, like even within that this is telling a story about people's lives and the events that they react to are interesting/funny.

breaking bad manages to balance a really intense plot with just perfect character development all the way through, like how it manages to pace each episode and make every moment feel so deftly used is amazing.

if we are to compare it's probably a better comparison point. i also disagree with the notion that wanting something that gets really raw and deep into its characters is somehow snooty or something. it's not, it's just exciting.

some dude, no offense but you like rizzoli and isles.

― polyphonic, Thursday, June 30, 2011 1:05 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark

i like Justified more fwiw, and there is a large difference of context between saying a highly praised and ilx-popular show isn't quite what people have hyped it up to be and saying that a show noone gives a shit about is pretty decent and watchable. but y'know whatever weakass ad hominem you want to use to discredit my opinion, "no offense."

sometimes shows just dont 'click' with people, for example i think community is petty funny but ilx thinks its the best sitcom of the decade, nothing you can do about that really, the thing is though, justified is really effing good

it might be because i have come to a lot of these shows after a long time never watching any tv drama, and i think with justified it feels too much "like a tv show" before i stopped watching stuff.