There's a video on the Chicago Trib site, which contains the shocking declaration that sometimes the line between good and evil blurs.
"Justified" has many things going for it, but its primary asset is Timothy Olyphant, who played Sheriff Seth Bullock in "Deadwood" and also appeared in Season 2 of "Damages." In "Justified," Olyphant plays Raylan Givens, a US Marshal who ends up back in his home state of Kentucky, where he doesn't really want to be. Yet Givens doesn't really fit in anywhere else.
There is something of the proper, repressed Bullock in Givens: Without coming out and saying so, both men communicate their disappointment at the lack of restraint and decorum they see in the world. Like the heroes of many classic Westerns, Givens is a man with a strong sense of right and wrong, and a tendency to enforce his ideas with the business end of a gun. This hat-wearing lawman isn't one of cable TV's anti-heroes; he's the hero-as-pariah, a man whose personal code makes him unable or unwilling to go with the flow.
What's your opinion? Please leave a comment.
I watched the pilot, because I very much liked "Deadwood."
ReplyDeleteIt was entertaining, and I suspect I'll stick with it for at least a few more episodes, but it stretched credibility rather a long way. That LAW rocket (where'd he get that, anyway--one of those Texas gun shows where Mexican drug cartels get everything short of nukes?) seemed to have about as much explosive power as a 250 lb. bomb.
Entertaining, though.
I'm looking forward to seeing it. So far I can't decide which I liked best, Deadwood or The Wire.
ReplyDelete"The Wire"--is that the one where the same guy (or two?) is (are?) escaping from a different prison every week? Never saw that one--it looked to me as if the suspension of disbelief would be more than I could manage.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure if you're joking about The Wire, you know how your humor eludes me sometimes, but The Wire is set in Baltimore, mainly the cops against the drug dealers.
ReplyDeleteI posted this video of the opening scene of the 1st episode. Maybe that's before we became associated.
Ah--I was thinking of another show entirely. Come to think of it, I think it was called "Prison Break." How I confused that with the show to which you are referring is a mystery--I'll use as my excuse the fact that I watch very little TV.
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