This weekend I did something a little crazy. Ok, a lottle crazy. In a recent issue of Entertainment Weekly there was an article written by Marc Snetiker on how to best prepare for the Emmys next Monday. Well, how to best prepare for the Emmys in only 24 hours and because I’m a weirdo, my first thought was, “I could do this. I should do this. I’m GOING to do this.” I honestly don’t watch a lot of the Emmy shows, especially in the Drama category, so I saw this as the perfect opportunity to get myself edumacated.
I prepared by making sure I had all of the recommended episodes or at least access to them and by placing an order with Amazon Fresh to make sure I had a cavalcade of themed snacks. As you should do for any binge.
Oh, and I live-tweeted the whole thing. And it turns out you can tweet a lot in 24 hours.
I have a pretty serious thing for TV lawmen. For the sake of my reputation I’m not going to divulge how many hours I’ve spent watching Law and Order: SVU because I like the way Christopher Meloni looks in a wrinkled shirt and a gun holster, but suffice it to say, it was a lot. So when I heard that FX was premiering a show about a trigger-happy US marshal staring none other than Timothy Olyphant, I was, to put it mildly, interested. And although I’m not a huge fan of FX in general (Louie and The League being the obvious exceptions) I was pretty sure that if nothing else, it would give me an excuse to look at this squared-jawed mug for an hour…
That being said, I was hooked on Justified by the end of the pilot’s opening credits. I mean, not only does someone get whacked in the first four minutes, they go down in one of the coolest televised shootouts in TV history. This is actually part of this show’s charm; while there is a TON of violence it never really feels gratuitous. Well, this scene might have been a little gratuitous…
And to be fair, it’s not all gore and gunfights. There’s also a little bit of romance for the ladies! Yes, apparently our hero Raylan Givens won’t rest till he’s killed all the crooks and bedded all the women of rural Kentucky.
And who could blame him, because from what I can tell, they all look like this…
and this…
My favorite part of this show, however, has to be the killer supporting cast. There’s Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins) who, over three seasons, has dabbled in everything from Nazism to organized crime. Another of my all time favorites was the murderous matron Mags Bennett, a role that won Margo Martindale the Emmy for best Supporting Actress in a Drama in 2011. Last but not least there’s Tim Gutterson (Jacob Pitts), the soft spoken, woefully underused deputy marshal who, despite having probably three lines in the whole last season still managed to make his way onto my list of the Most Adorable Men on TV (Ellen will back me up on this).
But this is all just one fangirl’s opinion. For the skeptics out there, I leave you with this clip. If this doesn’t convince you Justified is worth your time, nothing will.
Fangirly 