I love me some Justified on FX

If you missed the first episode Tuesday night, let me recommend you seek out a new series on the FX cable network (channel 59 on Comcast in Pulaski County).

The show is called Justified, and like other excellent FX series such as The Shield and The Riches, it's rated TV-MA, for mature audiences due to some fairly graphic violence and repeated use of the words shit and bullshit. So just know that going in... but what a program. The first hour really gets you hooked.

With LOST winding down, I had been looking for a new drama series to get into. This seems likely to be it.

The show stars Timothy Olyphant, who played the sheriff on HBO's Deadwood, as a deputy U.S. Marshall in Florida who shoots one too many suspects and is transferred from the sun and surf back to the hometown he thought he had escaped in the coal mining hills of Kentucky.

Olyphant plays Raylin Givens as the quiet type who shoots first and asks questions later. One review I read mentioned that Givens is the first TV cop to wear a Stetson hat since Dennis Weaver played McCloud from 1970-1977.

What makes the pilot episode seem like the opening chapter of a great novel is the supporting cast, most notably Walton Goggins (Shane Vendrell on The Shield) as Boyd Crowder, Raylin's best buddy growing up, but now a White Supremacist and local crime boss. That's him at left.

You have two more chances to catch the first episode of Justified before episode 2 premieres at 9:00 Tuesday night. You can watch the pilot on FX at 10:00 Friday night and at 10:30 Saturday night. Consult your guides to double-check me on those times.

Poking around on the website for the series I learn there is no streaming of the episode yet (perhaps to come in a few days after the repeat airings).

I also learn about a potentially exciting new project involving Goggins and his Little Rock producing partners Ray McKinnon and Lisa Blount. The three run the Little Rock-based Ginny Mule Pictures. McKinnon is the fine character actor who played the "bona-fide" suitor in O Brother, Where Art Though? Blount and I did a play together at Jacksonville High School circa 1975, then just a few years later she won accolades for her role in An Officer and A Gentleman. She and her husband McKinnon won Oscars for co-producing the 2001 short subject The Accountant.

Anyway, it says on the FX website that:

Goggins is in development at AMC on Rectify, an original series for which he will star and executive produce. The project is written by Ray McKinnon and exec produced by Mark Johnson (Breaking Bad).

Sounds very exciting. AMC is the home of Mad Men and Breaking Bad, two of the most acclaimed free cable dramas to come along in years. Elsewhere, I read that in the series Goggins will play a wrongfully convicted man who finally gets exonerated thanks to DNA evidence.