TV Review: Justified Saves Wednesday Nights

Depending on who you are different nights of the week will be considered good for TV. For me Tuesday night—which has a week high of six shows I watch from so-so programmers like V and No Ordinary Family to quietly excellent shows like Parenthood, The Good Wife, Southland, and Lights Out—is the best night of the week. Not because any one show really has me waiting for the next with baited breath, but it’s a group effort that makes for a great night. On a lesser level, the same can be said for NBC’s Thursday night comedies, although I do genuinely love Parks and Recreation.

However, when it comes to Monday and Wednesday nights…get ready for suck. At least, that was the case up until a month ago. Don’t get me wrong Mondays are still god awful, but as of early February Justified rode in on a white horse and saved Wednesday nights. A night that hasn’t really been decent since Lost went off the air last May.

For those unfamiliar with FX’s Justified, it’s the story of Raylan Givens, a US Marshall in rural Kentucky (as if there’s any other kind) and the Aryan underground, Dixie mafia, and meth dealers that occupy his time. The show is loosely serialized with some cases only lasting an episode—like the great, twist filled second episode of this season where Raylan is on the hunt for a pregnant fugitive—and others lasting several episodes stretched throughout the season. As a big serialized show fan (I have no interest in watching any show that doesn’t build week to week), I’m most interested in the latter.

Justified enters its second season even better than the first—which had too many stand alone episodes in the beginning before really hitting its stride in the great final episodes which involved religious vigilantes, a big time meth dealer, and Raylan’s shady father—by cooking up a great new villain: Mags Bennet, a middle aged woman with three sons who acts as cozy as your own grandmother…when she’s not ordering people killed. This woman and her three sons (one of whom is the county sheriff) are rural predators hoping to take over the more suburban Dixie mafia’s meth routes. Mags comes on deceptively sweet before blindsiding you with the meanness lurking just under the surface. It’s a pretty good representation of the rural south in all honesty.

Supporting Scene Stealer: Although the new villains do add juice to this season, it’s still a season one “bad guy” (although by now Boyd is more of a fan favorite than Raylan) named Boyd Crowder (played by the excellent Walton Goggins from The Shield) that steals every scene he’s in. In only a season and a half we’ve seen Boyd stir up a shit storm of trouble as a bank robber, then as a convict, then as a recently paroled holy warrior vigilante that leads a backwoods (literally) church, and now in his latest incarnation as a coal miner who just wants to avoid trouble. Of course, trouble still won’t avoid him, and the previews for this week’s episode show Boyd leading an armor car robbery and using a coal mine for an escape route. No other crime show on TV more accurately portrays the low key cleverness of a career criminal.