The choice is not easy, as the competition is fierce – just mention The Sopranos or The Wire – but justified. Raylan’s Law may be the best police series in history. The problem with this statement is not that it is as capricious as any other superlative definition, but that the production starring Timothy Olyphant may not even be a police series. It treads a terrain that also fits into social realism as it paints an x-ray picture of a depressed county in the southern United States or the West. After all, its protagonist is a sheriff’s deputy who always wears a wide-brimmed hat – more precisely, a Stetson Dallas – who goes looking for fugitives and also spends almost all of his seasons with a classic duel “Who knows who ?” ends First.
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Justified aired six seasons between 2010 and 2015 and is now returning with a new one set eight years later: Justified. Wild City – in the US ended this week, in Spain it will premiere on September 6th on Disney+, where you can watch the entire series – with the same protagonist, Sheriff Raylan Givens, who seems to have lost neither his cockiness nor his cockiness his sense of smell, but with a radical change of scenery: it goes from Harlan County, Kentucky, an area devastated by poverty, the end of mining and opiates, to Detroit, a city equally devastated by deindustrialization, unemployment and drugs.
Vivian Olyphant and Timothy Olyphant, in the first episode of “Justified: Wild City.” Chuck Hodes
But what unites all the chapters is not just its characters, nor its screenwriters, nor even the fact that, despite a variety of subplots, Justified essentially tells a single story: the obsessive chase of a federal agent Givens, reminiscent of the hunt for the white whale – a U.S. Marshall, the heir to the sheriffs of the West who wear a star on their badge – to Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins), the king of the underworld in Harlan County. The material on which the dreams of the entire series are built is purely literary: it is the work of the American Elmore Leonard (1925-2013), one of the most influential authors of crime and western novels, admired by Martin Amis and Quentin Tarantino or Stephen King, who said of him: “He writes the kind of novels that, when you get up with chocolate chip cookies, you pick up the book so you don’t miss anything.”
The series is inspired by a story by Leonard, Fire in the Hole, and his novel Pronto, and he even wrote a book so the writers could get more storylines, Raylan. “They pay me $12,500 for each episode, so I said to myself, ‘I have to contribute because I always work in exchange for my salary,'” he said in an interview with EL PAÍS about his 45th novel, which The adventures of the novel continue Sheriff.
The new season is based on another book by Leonard, Wild City, which does not feature Givens, but rather a large gallery of sinister characters roaming freely through the old automobile city, now disbanded along with the vanished powerful industry
Timothy Olypant and Walton Goggins, in Justified: Raylan’s Law.
Leonard, who died 10 years ago on August 20, 2013, worked as a screenwriter in the first few seasons, although the essence is that his narration runs through the entire saga, as in many Tarantino films – the one in Jackie Brown adapted – or Steven Soderbergh – adapted one of his best books, A Very Dangerous Romance. He is also the author of what many critics consider a Western masterpiece: “A Man,” adapted into a 1967 film by Martin Ritt. Apart from his western novels, beautifully edited by Valdemar, most of his books are currently difficult to find in the Spanish versions published by Ediciones B or Alianza.
Leonard’s influence goes beyond the specific scripts: it is much deeper, in this production but also in a large proportion of contemporary crime dramas. The secret of Justified’s coherence and strength lies precisely in the ability that its creator – Graham Yost – and its key screenwriters – VJ Boyd, Ingrid Escaladas, Chris Provenzano and Nichelle D. Tramble – had to interpret Leonard’s work: agile dialogue, Command of oral language, bad anthologies, good ones that are never quite good, and a great sense of humor.
Timothy Olyphant and Vivian Olyphant, in a moment from “Justified: Wild City.” Chuck Hodes (Photographer: Chuck Hodes)
Loser rednecks
In this 2009 interview with EL PAÍS, Leonard said: “What really represents your literary characters is the way they speak. The plot and everything else, even the outcome of the story, hardly matters.” And of Justified, he claimed: “The characters’ Southern accents are extraordinary and sound exactly how I imagined.” It doesn’t work in the series so much about what happens – important though it is – but about what happens to a series of specific characters who are trying to get to the next day as best they can in a hostile and depressed country that is falling apart. It describes pure villains, ruthless killers who can kill their brother without batting an eyelid, but the characters who survive season after season always range in a huge range of shades of gray, both the police and the gangsters. When it premiered, New York Times critic Mike Hale wrote that the series was a “hillbilly noir.” Hillbilly is a borderline offensive word – it means hillbilly – and it describes most of the characters. Rayland has managed to escape this desolate, rural world, which is more than enough for most of the characters.
Jacob Pitts, Timothy Olyphant and Erica Tazel in the original series Justified: Raylan’s Law.
Of all of them, it’s hard not to empathize with Ava Crowder, played by Joelle Carter, a woman who kills her abusive husband in the first film. She is a born survivor: into prison, into poverty, into the mafia, into the police. He just wants to escape a county and a state that is collapsing and offering its citizens no way out. “I think the only way to get out of our town alive is to not be born there,” gangster Boyd Crowder says at the end of season six.
Ava plays an integral role in the final episode of season six, which we don’t want to reveal to those lucky enough not to have seen it. The hateful, but also friendly and respectful relationship between Rayland and Crowder is also extraordinary and deeply rooted in Leonard’s works. At some point the policeman says to the gangster: “There is one thing that takes me back to the past, even at the risk of becoming sentimental.” And he replies: “We dig coal together.”
Boyd Holbrook and Timothy Olyphant, in the second episode of “Justified: Wild City.” Marian Wyse
In the final chapter, Rayland takes out from his drawer a worn copy of The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins, a crime novel considered a classic of the genre and Leonard’s favorite novel, and says to his companion, “If I said so that “I read it ten times, it would be too short.” In the prologue of the Spanish edition of Libros del Asteroid, Dennis Lehane writes: “In Higgins’ world there are no noble gangsters who allow themselves to be carried away by tragedy, nor honest, Justice-obsessed police officers.” These are people who sign every day. For some, the job is to steal, kidnap or kill. For others, the job is to arrest or prosecute suspects. In short, they are hardworking.” A sentence that applies to this book and to all of Leonard’s works, in which Justified has a front row seat.
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