i have to agree with you there, Adam.Originally Posted by Adam Lounsbery
I find Boardwalk Empire to be such a show. I've stopped it after a particular scene in any given episode and picked it up a day or two later, so you are right, Adam, I'm sure it does depend on the show.Shows with dense storylines and many characters, however, I found I enjoy better if I watch a week at a time, and really digest everything that's gone on so far before watching another hour.
just finishing up the second season.
Wow. Just a great show. The cast has some interesting faces. Margo Martindale is the Ma-Barker-type crime boss. She's quite good -- a familiar face finally given a meaty role. She's not just the heavy, older family friend (like she is in everything including Dexter). And her sons -- especially "Twitchy" from Lost Jeremy Davies. I suspect they may have wanted John Hawkes but Davies is just fine. Him and Brad William Henke as fat and skinny sons/drug dealers despite not looking anything alike are convincing as siblings.
Justified is my favorite show right now...great characters and multiple storylines. Boyd Crowder is the best villain on tv. I don't see them killing him off until the very last episode of the very last season. I would think Raylan and Boyd might finally have it out right at the very end.
For those of you interested in that sort of thang, the honky-tonk gal wielding the Gretsch in last night's episode was Lynda Kay.
Kind of a Roy Orbison sounding woman who records lots of good songs for you to listen to while you weep into your bourbon.
Thanks, Nauga! I was wondering who she was.
Lynda Kay was very good. The music (now more Americana and Bluegrass and less Country/Western) is perfect for the series. Especially seasons 2 and 3 (if you're into it). Linda Kay's getup is a bit of a gimmick. I've seen her in interviews wearing a Ramones T-shirt (and hair like... well the Ramones.) The gold dress and big hair is awesome though.
Things I love about Justified:
The music
The Justified producers have a good eye for the ladies. Ava, Winona, Erica, the red-head from the mining company, Carla Gugino as Karen Goodall (playing Elmore Leonard's Karen Sisco again... did anyone catch that? She's remarried now and is Karen Goodall). I guess we won't be seeing her again... bit of a waste of an appearance but nice to see anyway.
The hat. They tried earlier on this season to get rid of the "business stetson" and cowboy shirts. What were they thinking? Seeing Raylan in a t-shirt and jeans (and no hat!) was unnerving.
Storyline. You have no idea where it's going or who's going to die.
Best bad guys on TV too.
I agree with you about the hat, but you know who doesn't?
http://www.avclub.com/articles/if-el...-justif,51558/
Among [Elmore Leonard's] complaints: that the hat is “too Western” and that Olyphant’s TV version of Raylan Givens character wears it far more often than his counterpart in Leonard’s books. But then, what is a Timothy Olyphant without his cowboy hat? Just the sleazebag from Go and The Girl Next Door, that’s what.
http://www.nj.com/entertainment/tv/i...justified.html
"I think he ought to just chuck it," Leonard says. "What’s he need it for? He’s not in the West; he’s from Kentucky. I think it’s got out of hand. It’s not the hat that he wears in the book — which is the small, little businessman’s Stetson, but well-worn, and crushed and disfigured."
Adam:
NOW I know why I didn't remember Rayland Givens from the books... they changed the character up so much I didn't recognize him.
From NY MAG:
I do remember Leonard went on an on how Givens wore a hat like the sheriff during the Oswald shooting. I have to say the changes they made all work. The hat may have to do with his dad being a baddy and he wanting to turn out differently -- thus the white good guy hat. (as it says above in the books his dad died and wasn't a criminal.)Elmore Leonard created the character Raylan Givens. But it was show-runner Graham Yost who transformed Leonard’s story “Fire in the Hole” into the pilot of the FX series Justified. Played by Timothy Olyphant with a brooding sexuality and steely resolve, Raylan still sees himself as a lawman out of an old Western, a man with a code. But Yost took some liberties with Leonard’s creation. “I wanted to write the coolest character on TV,” he says. Here’s how he did it.
9A. Change the age.
“He’s in his fifties in Elmore’s world and 40 in ours,” Yost says. “So his references are more toward TV than film Westerns.” Specifically, “Gunsmoke’s Matt Dillon. Raylan isn’t really a shouter.”
9B. Give him a tortured backstory.
Leonard’s story had Raylan’s coal-miner father dead of black lung, but Yost took inspiration from the character’s trademark Stetson to develop a more colorful family history. “If someone makes a choice to wear the hat,” Yost says, “then he’s really chosen to be a marshal. That’s got to come from somewhere. I thought, If you’re making that strong of a choice maybe your father was a career criminal.”
9C. Keep his adversary alive.
In “Fire in the Hole,” Raylan kills his childhood friend, the charismatic white supremacist Boyd Crowder. In Justified’s pilot, Boyd, played by Walton Goggins (The Shield), originally suffered the same fate. But Yost, in pondering how to make a thirteen-episode first season, changed his mind. As Yost notes, “Boyd is the closest thing that Raylan has to an equal.”
9D. Add Complexity.
In a quiet moment in Justified’s pilot, Raylan’s ex-wife says, “Honestly, you’re the angriest man I’ve ever known.” Leonard says that moment surprised him. “Justified’s Raylan has more sides to him than the way I wrote him.” Says Yost: “With a short story or novel, it’s closed. We don’t have to find out more about the guy. In a series you do need some place to go. He seems like this cool character, but still waters run deep.”
9E. Nix the kids Raylan has two children in Leonard’s story, and none on the show. “Children on the periphery can be complicating. You feel because you’re not seeing the children, Oh my God, he’s the worst parent alive. Like Frasier.”
9F. Lose the hat, eventually
Leonard says he imagined Raylan’s hat as “a gentleman’s Stetson, the kind cops wore when Oswald was shot.” Yost admits, “Elmore didn’t like our hat much,” and as the season has progressed, the show’s writers have quietly moved away from it. “There’s been an evolution. It was Raylan’s affectation early on—he was always in the hat in the pilot— and now he wears it less.” In fact, he lost it in last week’s episode, “Hatless.”
I read the Raylan stories after the first season of Justified and had a lot of trouble picturing him without the TV version of his hat! I hears early on that Leonard wanted to have more of the Stetson Whippet type, but they've gone for so much more of a country feel with Raylan's character I think that detective-looking Stetson would have been amiss.
Anyway... There was a discussion recently about static protagonists and compelling television. The crux came from this Atlantic article that questioned the wisdom of having an unchanging protagonist on an ever-evolving show, two examples being Raylan Givens and Don Draper of Mad Men.
It's a fine line to tread, and it seems there's a trick to it: having dynamic antagonists and not having the seasons drag out long past the death rattle. (Dexter and 24 are both cited as not knowing when to fold 'em.) I think networks are becoming smarter at knowing when to quit a show, and I don't agree that they necessarily hang on to characters like Givens to draw viewers, as The Atlantic speculates:
Inconsistency within a protagonist from week-to-week is annoying to viewers and smacks of sloppy writing... to me, anyway. I'm not so sure that these characters don't change - just that it's so slight, it doesn't alter their entire personality or change their priorities. Perhaps that's more true to life? I guess where one man sees steadfast character traits, another man sees improbably monotony.No series (with one recent, very dramatic exception) is likely to kill off its main character, since that person tends to be its most recognizable, most liked, and the focus of its primary narrative and marketing campaign.
Food for thought.
I'm late, of course, but just started into season 3 and it's still delivering.
I can't believe they would bring Karen Goodall back just to relegate her to obscurity.
As you say, Steve. This show is so beautifully unpredictable that anything can happen.
And... , I agree completely. These are the meanest and best villains on TV in a long time.
I really can't help but like Boyd, even if every one of my instincts screams, "Are you crazy?"
It's easy to like Raylan. Olyphant has hit just the right note with him, although I confess I'd forgo the whole domestic arrangement, baby and all. Maybe it's just me, but Winona just seems to pale by comparison. It's as though she were, constantly, like the proverbial deer caught in the headlights.
Anyway, to me the show is so delectably noir.
That's an interesting article. But I don't know if I agree that characters don't change. I agree with you they do. Don Draper on Mad Men is simply stuck in his ways. As the 60s evolves, although he's surrounded by hippies, gets a divorce, forms his own company, he stays the same. But it's because he's hiding behind the main character's name. He's not actually Draper but pretending to be.
The Walking Dead. Someone woke up the writers this 1/2 of this season. Rick Grimes is becoming more bad ass and less boring. True, he won't become a victim of the zombies (here's a vote that his wife gets it though!), but he's changed since the beginning of the series.
Justified. Remember the pilot: "You're the angriest man I know!" Well, he's actually not angry. Ever. He's annoyed by the colorful characters (his bristling reactions to all the goings on is key to the show) around him but never actually angry. Seems they made him too cool for that. Will the child change him? Possibly.
Dexter was basically ruined by his family life and child. Dexter did change. But the show became almost unwatchable since he cares so much about his sister, kid and friends now. Remember he used to fake caring for anything or anyone during the first season.
I couldn't agree more. Maybe I'm wrong and completely off the mark when I say that it seems as though the ancestral puritanical inheritance, brought over on the Mayflower may run deeper than the American psyche is aware of. In other words, I think that the American public is still not prepared for protracted immorality. At least not in the mainstream that Dexter now peoples.
Steve-O (01-10-2013)
Not unnoticed: the last episode of Justified was filled with illegal drug use, perverts, criminals and sex for votes... That show is something else. And the hat only made one appearance -- hanging on a hook.
Justified started up again Tuesday night. It's such a great show. So many quirky story lines blended together. Just a pleasure to watch.
I quite like this series. Just caught the first episode of season 2 on the weekend.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=zpM7k2bvx28
keep your eye out for Dave Alvin supposed to appear in Late Feb on Justified
Last edited by mkhand; 01-11-2013 at 10:15 AM.
Love it, though I have some catching up to do. Still have to see Season 3 which came out a little while ago on disc.
My preferred way to watch these series is 'one season, one sitting' - though I did begin to feel a little bent out of shape going at it with seasons of 'Breaking Bad'.
What suspension of disbelief?
I got it as a gift and enjoyed season 1, I'll probably continue it sometime down the line.
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