People act like the latest season of Justified was the vindicating flaming sword of justice in the hands of the returning Christ-Child mounted on a mutant elephant, come for your sinful enemies, but I swear it ain't quite so.
It was barely even good.
I kept watching it to see if anything would turn up, as usually it does, but this time it really didn't.
Of course New York magazine elected to declare it this week's "heir to the Sopranos" at this point - after three great seasons, they declared their hand in the lull. Typical of New York magazine. Need it be pointed out that on reflection the Sopranos wasn't even that great? I preferred Big Love -- Homicide -- Deadwood -- The Wire of course -- even Hell on Wheels. What'd the Sopranos ever get us after all? What televisual revolution did it realize? It got us Boardwalk Empire. Or, as it's known, The Implausible in Pursuit of the Unintelligible. Who among ye buys Steve Buscemi as a mob boss?
Last season of Justified was a Dick Tracy arc of excesses and grotesques. It was Justified over-heating, over-reaching itself and turning into a cartoon, but it was a total swell to behold. Even when they stole the shock of the arm-chopping motif from Big Love (more recently employed in Game of Thrones, still to magnificent effect) it was fine. The season before that, the old Harlan County, Which Side Are You On? bit, I thought at first was hard-going down a terminal mine-shaft but when I watched it again on DVD it was full of subtle delights. Principally, the Bennetts. They blew it twice as I see it, once when they killed off Dickie Bennett (in Season 3) and second time when they killed off the best character in the whole show, Arlo Givens (this season).
Let me here recommend in creepy earnest the film Interview With the Assassin.
You know who else is great in that line? The guy who plays the corrupt beat cop in Person of Interest.
The first season of Justified, meanwhile, as I believe I noted elsewhere, is a protracted version of a Road Runner cartoon, or Sylvester & Tweetie Pie, or Tom & Jerry. Punisher versus Wolverine. You get the idea. They managed to sustain that somehow but I think the ghost got coughed up this season. What's left to say between Raylan and Boyd? They need to shit or get off the pot.
This season blew partially from bad "American Southron Gothic" mis-writing and terminally purple over-writing. They cranked up the good-old-boy trash-talking into turbo overdrive but that didn't work it just choked the viewer with exhaust fumes. Wise-cracking, Raylan sounded like a badly-written Johnny Storm from the Fantastic Four or Spider-Man and if I didn't know better I'd suspect that some of those bad bad writers from the comic books who keep popping up now in Hollywood had infiltrated the writer's high table at Justified and were ruining perfectly good characters with their dreamy out-of-character bon mots and weird inconsistencies. These fucking frustrating paeans to David fucking Mamet.
Would that this man Mamet had never been born for what has been wrought in his image.
Raylan Givens was so full of liquid smarm and drawling (illogical) olde county saws that he was rendered nonsensical and vapid. It was like he stepped out of a Foxfire book and was going to show us how to whittle a banjo from a gourd but that was about all he'd contribute. He'd smirk and squint for money. Conversely, Boyd Crowder worked like a dray horse, I'll give him that, but as a result he degenerated into Shane from The Shield, scrabbling to maintain an even keel in the face of impending disgrace. I expected Vic Mackey to show up and make him scramble, do fifty squat thrusts for auld lang syne. That boy was all over the shop, both figuratively and literally. That poor old boy don't know if he's coming or going, whether he's a prophet or a small-time oxycontin dealer. I missed the days when he was the snake-handling born-again blood-drinking Great Awakening come-outer. Them was good times. Now it's all just ambling around the bar and the trailer park looking for his script and his teeth-whitener.
After the grotesques of last season the "bad guy" this season was a nebulous identikit bald guy. A poor man's Vic Mackey. That pepped-up archetypal screen hood Wynn Duffy was better than this. I was actually relieved when Wynn Duffy sauntered into a scene this season. For this Dickie Bennett had to die? Raylan dispatched this same nameless, nebulous "bad guy" with scarcely a damn. As an afterthought. Why he did it with a phone call. He really did phone it in. You got the sense that his nonchalance was mirrored by the comics geek assholes at the writers' long table too. Phoned-in. They're just so happy they're in Hollywood in the sunshine and they're getting laid and they can live out their Turtle-from-Entourage fantasies.
Good luck to 'em. I like Hollywood. I especially like walking in the hills and going to the Laurel Canyon store to buy a packet of the red Monster Munch for a dollar -- which is actually cheaper than they cost at heathrow Airport or even (depending on the exchange rate) in a Waitrose.
It's cheaper to buy the six pack than a single packet.
Crazy.
At Heathrow, they were selling three packets of crisps for £3, and they called that a "sale."
Well it's a pity but FX still has The Americans which dipped but is getting good again.
Plus we have Person of Interest, in which the Chinese virus has finally struck and the downfall of civilization is upon us.
Pray for me.
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