Justified

It's my favorite show at the moment. Timothy Olyphant's easy repartee with the bad guys is what keeps me coming back. They're not written as black hats and white hats, or criminal masterminds. They're all just flawed people, and some can be reasoned with over whiskey and fried chicken. But other times, ya just gotta outdraw a mother****er.

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If I had a dollar for every existential crisis I've ever had, does money really even matter?

I can't believe there wasn't anyone here that gave this show a chance. The first season finale was tonight and it was a great conclusion to a solid season The acting is better than ANY show on right now. First class and I recommend it highly!

I watched most of the episodes. Missed a few here and there, as it didn't do much to reel me in...but it's a good show. No doubt that it'll get picked up for another season.

Missed the finale, though.

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"This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined." -Baruch Spinoza

I just happened across it in the first episode--hadn't heard anything about it and didn't know any of the actors except the "fire in the hole" guy also played a good--and somewhat similar--part in The Badge.

I like the way they do Southerners, both black and white, with an ear for our language and an eye for our eccentricities. Olyphant and his boss would fit right in with the real US Marshals I've known, and I've known a few judges who were almost as colorful as the speedo-wearing, woman-chasing, gun-toting magistrate in that one episode.

I really liked the season closer--for the first time I bought into the conversion of the marshal's killer buddy. That scene when he asks,
"Have I just been talking to myself?" was a fine piece of acting encapsulating all of that character's doubt of himself, doubt of his religious conviction, and doubt of his God, with all the resulting spirital and emotional pain.

Those two gangster daddies were something, weren't they? Both the marshal's and his criminal buddy's. Talk about your hard cases!

Ol' Waylon's (Wayland?) ex-wife should dump her loser husband and get back with him. Just don't get married again--marriage has ruined a lot of love affairs, especially in the South. She's prettier and probably better in the sack than that white trash ol' gal who nearly got her and him killed because she wouldn't get out of the state.

I just finished watching all of the first season. Exceptional! The best way to describe the charm of Justified is it has a slow unhurried pacing like a Clint Eastwood directed movie. The actors dont seem like actors, the characters are easy to like, and the writing is above the norm in whats been available for a long time on tv. I encourage everyone that hasnt heard about it to give it a look.

I didn't read most of the posts above because I just started watching this last night. The TV season is over now so all our favorite shows are done for a bit, save South Park, basically. We're going to dive into Breaking Bad soon but we want to save it just a little bit longer, so in the meantime we thought we'd buy the pilot episode of Justified, and we liked it enough to buy the entire first season on Amazon Video. And I hear the second season is better, so odds are good we'll roll through both in the next month or so.

We're two episodes in, by the by. I'll come back after we've finished season one, most likely, or if there are any truly awesome moments, though in the latter case I'll keep avoiding the posts above.

Finished Homeland, which saw no thread for, and heard this had amazing second season so giving it a go from start. Olyphant picking up his Deadwood hat

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Cool, let us know what you think. I expect you'll dig it.

Comes back on the air quite soon, too. Woohoo.

Yeah, i'm a sucker for Walton Goggins too, very underrated character actor. He owned the final season of The Shield. Pilot was good, didn't really develop a hook or unique premise, yet.

Not reading most of the posts in this thread, just in case; I've been DVRing these and for one reason or another just didn't get around to them, and when I didn't I thought, hey, let 'em pile up and go marathon style later. Started last night; just the first two, so I'll pop back in when I've caught up to be on the safe side, spoiler-wise.

Gotta say, though: two episodes in, and this show is dense. I'm probably simplifying the show a little in my memory, but I don't remember it being nearly as complicated in the first two seasons as it already is in this one. I'm not complaining, but it seems like a big shift.

Do really love the feel of it, though. It's got that Coen-esque love of dialects and that lovely toying with stereotypes that comes from folksy accents saying eloquent, witty things. I love just listening to it, regardless of what else is happening.

Love it!!!

Ive watched Justified from the first season and it not only gets better each year, but much better. Season 3 seems like an entire new level of plot twists & intensity that 1 & 2 didnt touch. Walter Googins is a great talent, but I enjoy the Art Mullins character (Nick Searcy) quite a bit.

Also if anyones ever wondered, heres the lyrics to the theme....


On this lonely road
Trying to make it home
Doing it by my lonesome - pissed off, who wants some
I’m fighting for my soul
God, get at your boy
You try to bogart - fall back, I go hard

On this lonely road
Trying to make it home
Doing it by my lonesome - pissed off, who wants some
I see them long hard times to come

I'm liking this season a lot, but I don't know, I still think I liked season 2 just a little bit better. I can't really judge it until I see the finale next week though.

I'd agree with that. I think the first half of this season was exceptional, but it setup a lot of potential payoffs that I think it's only somewhat delivered on.

The finale could turn that all on its head, but I'll be surprised if it does. Still been very good, though.

Yeah, I feel like they've done a lot of stuff they're not going to be able to wrap up. I find it hard to believe Rayland is even still a marshal, because we have barely even seen any of the other marshals this season. It's like he's just off doing his own thing or something, to me at least.

Wow, Justified knows how to end a season! Ive never complained about their finales, that was some awesome television!

Yeah, I was pretty satisfied. Especially given that I wasn't expecting much based on the last few weeks; not because they were bad or anything, but simply because it looked like the numerous plot threads weren't going to tie together in interesting ways. Turns out they didn't really have to.

More tomorrow.

Holy crap! That was the best season by far. At times the Robert Quarles character would turn my stomach, and then make me bust out loud laughing. The Limehouse characters an exceptional addition, and Walter Googins is able to display alot more, and run with the part with Boyd a full fledged criminal. I hope they give Dickey Bennett his ballcap back next year though.

I became a Timothy Olyphant convert at Deadwood and enjoyed the Hitman character. Justified is a very cool show with lots of good old Southern boy characters, something that James Lee Burke would be great at writing about, although his fixation is New Orlerans.

I was pleasantly surprised by the finale. After the first few episodes this season, I was highly impressed at how intricate and heavily plotted the series was; far more so this year than in the past, to my memory. And as it went on, it just kept going, with characters and their interests and their angles become more intertwined. I got excited to see how they would wrap it all up, and make sense of the chaos.

A few episodes before the finale, though, it became clear they weren't going to do that, and I got a little bummed. Quarles broke down (which I like in a few ways, mind you) and characters started doing all sorts of things based on informed guesses and sometimes opaque motives. I like this in small doses--a character making a mistake because they think something wrong that we know is wrong is usually the height of drama--but there was quite a bit of it. And I, admittedly, like the stories that can go all the way to the edge of chaos and bring everything back into alignment by the end.

So, I was a little disappointed then. But the finale was the next-best thing to tidying everything up, because it had a number of simultaneous payoffs. We've been watching Quarles use that rig all year, and there've been multiple comments on the possibility of it jamming up, so naturally I assumed that it would jam during some climatic battle. And we've been watching Limehouse hang around those pigs holding that cleaver all year, too, so it was nice that both toys came to a head against one another, just above Quarles' arm. And Raylan holding it farther away from him as he reached for it was pretty hysterical, too.

Wasn't quite what I'd hoped for it, but still quite good. And I could feel better about it if several of the dangling conflicts are resolved nicely next year. This is actually the rare TV season that might heavily benefit from a second watch, given the angles involved. There were a few episodes around two-thirds of the way through where you basically needed a machete to cut through the web of what everyone was trying to do to everyone else.



And man, I really thought Boyd was going to get that money. However the show ends, we know a big confrontation between Boyd and Raylan has to be in the cards, and I figured $3.2 million would really kick his criminal enterprise into high gear. Then again, maybe that's the point: the show's plenty successful and they see no reason to ramp up the inevitable end game just yet.

Still a really great job, and I'm glad it's already been picked up for a fourth season. I know of no better modern source of badass one-liners, either.