Editor’s Note: A version of this story first appeared in The Good, the Bad, and the Elegy, a newsletter from the Daily Yonder focused on the best, and worst, in rural media, entertainment, and culture. Every other Thursday, it features reviews, retrospectives, recommendations, and more. You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article to receive future editions in your inbox.
For decades, crime fiction in print, movies, and TV warned us that cities were full of thieves, drug dealers, and murderers.
Then came “Justified,” the 2010 TV series set in rural Kentucky, which assured us that the hills, hollers, and small towns of the heartland could more than compete with big cities in terms of methamphetamine makers and users, homicidal maniacs, and white supremacists. Not to mention the Dixie Mafia.
For all of us who longed to see stories set in rural territories as dangerous as Dirty Harry Callahan’s San Francisco or Popeye Doyle’s New York City, “Justified” showed us that there were plenty of cops-and-robbers locales to go around.
I’ve often wondered if tourism officials from all over the country ever sat down at a hotel bar and commiserated over how their communities were portrayed in films and TV.
South Florida tourism expert: “Yeah, back in the ‘80s, ‘Miami Vice’ made it look like there was a drug war going on in our streets.”
Kentucky tourism expert: “Oh yeah? Well, ‘Justified’ made us look worse. Heck, the show spent a whole season on one murderous moonshine-making family in which the mom took a hammer to her misbehaving adult son’s fingers.”
South Florida: “Okay, yeah, you got me beat.”
Across six seasons ending in 2015, “Justified” entertained us with stories of the Givens, Crowders, and the Bennetts, as well as the U.S. marshals who tried to keep them in line.
A new, limited-run series, “Justified: City Primeval,” premiered July 18 on the cable channel FX. The only returning cast member that we know of is Timothy Olyphant, who plays Marshal Raylan Givens. The new series is based on “City Primeval,” a Detroit-set crime novel by Elmore Leonard, the masterful writer whose work the original “Justified” was also based on.
“City Primeval” the series might take place entirely in Detroit and not even tip its Stetson to the good and bad people of Harlan County, Kentucky. But there’s plenty of great rural “Justified” action in the rearview.
Crimes and Coal Mines
Elmore Leonard was no stranger to writing about violence in dusty little towns. The author, born in New Orleans in 1925, was for years best known for his gritty western stories. His western stories were loved by readers and by filmmakers and moviegoers. If Leonard had written nothing but the stories on which the movies “Joe Kidd,” “Hombre,” and “3:10 to Yuma” were based, he’d have a place in the annals of great, compulsively readable fiction.
In a 2018 story for CrimeReads looking back on Leonard’s westerns, Nathan Ward wrote that Leonard felt right at home as he segued from westerns to crime stories, from the great and grisly outdoors to the dangerous canyons of the city. “Crooks are crooks; mainly the landscape changed,” Ward wrote.
Leonard turned the bulk of his writing toward crime stories around 1969, when Hollywood was happily adapting his westerns. He went on to write stories and novels made into some of the best crime films of their time, including “Out of Sight,” “Jackie Brown,” and “Get Shorty.” The films often took place in Detroit or Miami, two cities with rich backdrops for crime fiction.
Luckily, Hollywood also recognized the value of Leonard’s unique view of rural and small-town crime, in particular “Fire in the Hole.” In the same CrimeReads article, Ward cites the opening lines of the 2001 novella that inspired “Justified.”
“They had dug coal together as young men and then lost touch over the years. Now it looked like they’d be meeting again, this time as lawman and felon, Raylan Givens and Boyd Crowder.”
How simple and direct a first paragraph. How full of promise for stories that have endured for more than 20 years and will continue through a new iteration of “Justified.”
Mining Family Drama
If you’re not familiar with “Justified,” the series follows Marshal Raylan Givens as he returns to Kentucky to work out of the Lexington office of the U.S. Marshals Service. Givens had attracted unwanted attention when he killed a criminal in Miami. The showdown came after the marshal had given the man 24 hours to get out of town.
The bad guy drew his gun first, Raylan argued. “It was justified.”
“Justified” developer Graham Yost, working from “Fire in the Hole,” recognized that Leonard’s reincarnated western story could reach a whole new audience for whom “western” meant John Wayne and horses. “Justified” represented a more modern, yet still familiar, take on the genre.
And “Justified” capitalized on a Leonard standard: criminals that were as fascinating, if not more so, than the cops. Boyd Crowder, played by Walton Goggins, firmly established this point, backed up by a colorful cast of ne’er-do-wells that ranged from bank-robbing dumb guys to meth-dealing dumb guys to racist dumb guys … well, you get the idea. Crowder was as smart as could be, but many of the other criminals who moved through the 78 episodes of “Justified” are, luckily for law enforcement, not the sharpest hoes in the shed.
Throughout the series, Givens and Crowder perform this complicated dance, moving from guys who dug coal together as young men to sworn enemies to unlikely allies, their relationship almost constantly morphing back and forth.
Goggins and his portrait of Crowder as a complicated small-town criminal might never be topped, but in the second season of “Justified,” the character Mags Bennett provided some intense competition — in more ways than one.
Mags, played by the masterful Margo Martindale, was the matriarch of a rural crime family. One son was a corrupt cop, while the other two helped their mama run a marijuana empire. There’s pointed history between Raylan Givens and the Bennetts and throughout the season they test each other’s strong and weak points.
In that same second season, “Justified” works in a storyline that rings true for its Kentucky locale: A mining company wants to level a mountain to mine coal, a development that puts all the principals on one side or another.
“Justified” looks like a series that’s set in Kentucky should look, with small downtowns, meandering roads carved into tree-covered hillsides, double-wide trailers and mansions, and remote locations used for marijuana grow operations. Though the series was filmed for the most part in small-town California, not Kentucky, in a commentary track for a first-season episode, Yost said that the production used special effects to “expand” a real-life prison to hide some California scenery.
“Justified” looks like a series that’s set in Kentucky should look, with small downtowns, meandering roads carved into tree-covered hillsides, double-wide trailers and mansions, and remote locations used for marijuana grow operations. Though the series was filmed for the most part in small-town California, not Kentucky, in a commentary track for a first-season episode, Yost said that the production used special effects to “expand” a real-life prison to hide some California scenery.
As extreme as its storytelling is, “Justified” does more than just exploit its rural Kentucky setting for crime stories. The series might have made Kentucky tourism officials wince, but in the entertainment industry, much of what’s considered “flyover country” between the East and West coasts never gets much attention. Justified rectified that.
You can watch all six seasons of Justified on Hulu. New episodes of Justified: City Primeval are currently airing on the cable channel FX.
Keith Roysdon is a retired newspaper reporter and editor who moved from Indiana to Tennessee and works as a freelance writer. He’s co-authored four true crime books, including “The Westside Park Murders,” which was named Best Nonfiction Book of 2021 by the Indiana Society of Professional Journalists. He writes news and pop culture commentary as well as fiction. His Tennessee-set crime novel “Seven Angels” was awarded the 2021 Hugh Holton Award for Best Unpublished Novel from Mystery Writers of America Midwest.
This article first appeared in The Good, the Bad, and the Elegy, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder focused on the best, and worst, in rural media, entertainment, and culture. Every other Thursday, it features reviews, recommendations, retrospectives, and more. Join the mailing list today to have future editions delivered straight to your inbox.
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