TV GUIDE: Roush Review: Dim Sunshine, Glorious Justified, FNL Farewell
Feb 9, 2011
by Matt Roush
Some very significant Wednesday night comings and goings in what has turned out to be an incredibly busy TV week. We welcome back an old sitcom Friend with conflicted emotions, but there's no doubting our enthusiasm for the return of a certain soft-talking, fast-shooting U.S. Marshal, and there's no hiding our sorrow as we bid farewell to a modern classic about small-town Americana and the game of life (also: football).
... The best news of the night — besides the return of "Clive Bixby" on Modern Family, as Phil once again attempts to woo Claire with his suave alter ego — is on cable, as FX launches a second season of Kentucky fried shenanigans with its very best current series: Justified, the wry, dry and my-oh-my-is-it-fun crime drama that's so riveting it could curl your whiskers.
Buoyed by the effortless charisma of Timothy Olyphant's star turn as the laconic but lethal Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, this series is a twisted triumph. You want Mom and apple pie? Meet Mags Bennett (the terrific Margo Martindale), the fearsomely frumpy matriarch of a pot-peddling crime clan, who serves up apple-laced moonshine. Occasionally with a side of poison.
In the season opener, Raylan steps into a hornet's nest of folksy malice while tracking down a sex offender in the Bennetts' employ named Jimmy Earl Dean — "Three first names, triple winner right off the bat," Raylan muses. As he crosses paths with these casually sadistic backwoods Borgias (including Lost's Jeremy Davies), we know no good can come from this. Only good TV.
When he isn't felling felons and trying to avoid the paperwork, Raylan is busy juggling heaps of personal baggage, including a crooked dad (Raymond J. Barry) on house arrest, an amorous ex-wife (Natalie Zea) who says, "That's what a girl wants to hear for pillow talk: regret," and childhood friend-gone-wrong Boyd Crowder (the electrifying Walton Goggins), who appears to have gone straight. But for how long?
Justified is expert at taking the audience by delightful surprise, lulling you with its laid-back attitude, only to jolt you off the couch with a shock of grisly mayhem. But unlike many of its dramatic FX peers, the tone isn't gloomy or nihilistic or cynical. It's a blast...
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