No great contemporary TV series is more flat-out enjoyable than Justified. The southern-fried crime drama, which wraps up its fourth season April 2 on FX, is as densely plotted as Game of Thrones; as brutal as Boardwalk Empire; and more consistently hilarious than almost any current sitcom. And it boasts some of the most musically ornate dialogue this side of the still-lamented Deadwood. “What precipitated this change in your weather vane?” demands Walton Goggins’s toothy, scheming anti-hero, Boyd Crowder, a more musical way of asking, “What made you change your mind?” And yet for all its creative brio, Justified never seems full of itself. The show wears its considerable ambition the way its hero, Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant), wears his cowboy hat: as if it’s no big deal at all. It’s an Elmore Leonard thing. The Detroit-based fiction master started out writing Westerns and segued into modern crime thrillers. Leonard’s original Raylan Givens story, “Fire in the Hole”—the basis for Justified—combined those modes; showrunner Graham Yost and co–executive producer Olyphant replicate them, along with Leonard’s laid-back showmanship. Justified is a brazenly ambitious show posing (very convincingly) as a humble one. There are deep, dark things happening between characters, and within characters, but the show never puts anyone on a therapist’s couch; with so many barstools and front porches around, it doesn’t have to...
But Justified never comes at you like a student looking for an A from the teacher. It’s high-fiber bubblegum, so tasty-sweet that you never think of it as being good for the mind. Any given episode is likely to contain impassioned arguments about morality as well as gunfights, torture scenes, “Who’s on first?”–style absurdist exchanges, and declarations of undying love. “I know this ain’t how most people do it, professing their love over a box of cash,” Boyd tells Ava, proposing to her with a pile of money he’s hoping to use as a down payment on a dream house. “But the way I see it, you and me, Ava, well … We ain’t like most people.” Justified ain’t like most shows. (x)
Такие чудо-статьи пишут нынче в американской прессе. Но вот что удивительно: сериал обладает исключительно талантливым кастом, шоураннером, что еженедельно держит ответ за каждую сцену каждого эпизода (!), группой сценаристов, умудряющихся придерживаться логики уже четвертый сезон подряд, и стабильными 90 баллами из 100 на Метакритике, и ВСЕ РАВНО зрителей можно пересчитать по пальцам. Почему? Хороший вопрос. Justified - один из самых недооцененных проектов на сегодняшнем телевидении. Имо.