Justified in laying down the law
West Vancouver writer Graham Yost heeds advice from late dad in scripting gritty police drama
Twists and turns abound in the gritty TV police drama penned by West Van writer Graham Yost, who admits to heeding advice from his late dad, Elwy.
Justified
Wednesday, 9 p. m., Super Channel
When Graham Yost was growing up in Etobicoke, Ont., long before the family moved to West Vancouver, he always knew he wanted to write.
Fine, his father, Elwy Yost, told him. But he had some words of advice for his son:
Whatever Graham wrote, said the respected host of TVOntario’s Saturday Night at the Movies — for the better part of three decades before his passing in 2011 — make sure there’s a twist. That way, even if Graham was writing something as rote and déclassé as a TV cop show, it will be distinctive.
There’s nothing familiar or rote about Justified, Graham Yost’s moody, tightly wound backwoods thriller, adapted from veteran crime novelist Elmore Leonard’s novella, Fire in the Hole.
Justified, set in the heart of Kentucky coal mining country, stars Emmy nominees Timothy Olyphant and Walton Goggins as lifelong adversaries who once mined coal together and are now on opposing sides of truth and justice.
Olyphant plays strong, silent lawman Deputy U. S. Marshal Raylan Givens, who’s quick with a quip and fast on the draw, but would rather settle a dispute with a well- timed word and some old- time common sense. Goggins plays erratic career criminal Boyd Crowder, former coal miner, small- time drug dealer and semi- reformed white supremacist who found his Lord and saviour Jesus Christ, then had a falling out with the good Lord and resumed his wanton ways.
When Justified’s fourth season ends Wednesday on Super Channel, Crowder and Givens are once again at loggerheads, but this time there’s an added twist.
A mobster from Detroit has arrived in Harlan County, looking for a former employee who vanished, D. B. Cooper- like, decades earlier, taking with him a shipment of recreational pharmaceuticals that weren’t his for the taking.
Said miscreant is said to have resurfaced in some godforsaken backwater in Kentucky, in the custody of the local lawman down there, and the city slicker from Detroit is determined that justice be served. His way.
From Justified’s Appalachian setting to the hardscrabble coal- country roots of its main characters, it is justifiably acclaimed as one of television’s most adult, addictive thrillers.
At a cursory glance, it seems familiar and rote. A strong, silent hero who wears a cowboy hat; a nervous, unshaven small- time crook with a weakness for easy money and loose women; a city- slicker mobster who arrives from the big city to straighten out the hicks in the sticks — these are all tropes of crime fiction.
Yost took his father’s advice to heart, though, and Justified snaps with wit and wry intelligence, both in the performances and in its crisp one- liners, as in a recent episode, co- written by Yost, in which the bemused mobster from the big city turns to the small- time country crook and tells him, “I love the way you talk ... always using 40 words when four will do.”
Then there was Givens’ counsel to a wayward soul in Justified’s season opener, also written by Yost, in which Givens says, “You ever hear the saying, ‘ You run into an a- hole in the morning, you ran into an a- hole. You run into a- holes all day, you’re the a- hole?’ ”
For four seasons, Yost, 53, and Leonard, 87, and a co- executive producer and consultant on the series, have bounced ripostes and retorts back and forth in Justified’s parade of desperadoes, would- be desperadoes and good people leading quiet lives of desperation, against a backdrop of rural poverty and shuttered coal mines.
Givens is the type of man who will use four words where others use 40, but that doesn’t mean he’s simple and uneducated.
In Yost’s season opener, Givens quotes a line from The Big Lebowski, then adds dryly, just in case the meaning was lost on the listener: “It’s from Lebowski. Netflix it; you can be one of the cool kids.”
Despite its twists, Justified’s real secret is keeping things simple, Yost says.
“The focus is generally on the guy in the hat,” he said earlier this year in Los Angeles. “It’s a fairly big world, though. We have our bad guys. And in Elmore Leonard’s world, you spend time with the bad guys. That’s a third of the show right there.”