We’re watching the entire series of Justified at the moment, and man, is it good!
Came to it sideways (as usual) – we started watching Alias, which made us familiar with Jennifer Garner. Then I remembered we had a copy of Catch & Release, a romantic comedy she stared in with Timothy Olyphant.
I was vaguely familiar with Olyphant from when he played the villain in Live Free or Die Hard. I liked his voice and the way he talked, but didn’t think anymore about him.
So we watched Catch & Release and I was struck all over again by how much I liked his voice. There is also a first-kiss scene in there that is so emotionally intense it makes the back of your knees sweat (check it out here).
I looked up Olyphant, as I didn’t know anything about him except for the Bruce Willis movie, and found out his most recent work was the series Justified. I had seen the image on the right on our streaming service for months, and kept thinking it was another historical western like Deadwood. But apparently it wasn’t.
Then I found out it was based on an Elmore Leonard short story called “Fire in the Hole“. That was enough to push me into watching the first episode. Thirteen episodes later, I came up for air. Holy moly! It’s some of the most interesting story-telling I’ve seen in a long time. True Detectives rivals it, but Justified has its own unique tint that makes it riveting.
The pulse pause moment that I keep recalling (and just have to capture on a page one day) is in the very first episode, when Raylen Givens breaks into the house of his ex-wife, Winona, scares the pants off her new husband, and when Winona wearily steps out onto the balcony to talk to Givens, he says (and I’m quoting from memory) he thought shooting the bad guy had been justified, but now he’s starting to wonder if he isn’t as cool about it as he thought. Maybe it was anger that made him shoot. And Winona’s comeback was perfect…and hooked me into the series. She shakes her head and says that everyone believes he is cool, calm, law-abiding, but she has always thought he was the angriest man she knew.
And that is Givens for the entire series. Controlled, icy…and deep down inside, angry.
It’s a great show!