an aside about justified

*A FEW SPOILERS*

Twice I have recommended Justified to people who ought to appreciate its sublime charms, and twice they have turned away without a second glance. It is difficult to convey the genius at the heart of the thing: a happy synchrony of writing, casting, and production design. Easy to ask, "Who wants to hang out with southern trash drug dealers?" Well, nobody does, unless they are Mags Bennett, Boyd Crowder, and Ava Crowder, and then, up in the Holler, there's Limehouse and his barbecue...

There's a convincing simplicity, droll humor, and occasional poetry to the dialogue which makes it low-key irresisitible. Here's an example of its genius: when it comes up on the inevitable moment when the pregnant Winona is going to leave the man she loves, there is no telegraphing of the intention. The couple is happier than they have ever been, and entirely devoted, one to the other. And yet, when he is riding in the car on his way home and says to his boss that, strangely, Winona is fine with the way things are, a chill goes through your heart and not only do you know exactly the letter he'll find when he gets home, but also your mind flashes back across a series of tiny moments and you know, but only in retrospect, that this is not sudden, that Winona has been coming slowly to grips with this decision for a very long time.

These women: Ava, Winona, Loretta, especially Mags Bennett (who I think I can say absolutely is my favorite villainess of all time, with her lack of glamour, and her particular mix of grounded pragmatism, maternal loyalty, and utter ruthlessness in the running of her crime empire) are some of the best written on television. Only Rachel has yet to spring into flaming life, but there's time.

I'll be honest: it was a hard sell for me, as well. I watched the pilot when it premiered and decided it was intriguing but far too weighty to take on as a weekly burden. Sometime into the second season I read a piece on Slant Magazine's "The House Next Door" blog which instructed me in how to fall in love with it (and I wanted to. What crazy person doesn't enjoy spending time with Timothy Olyphant?), and this knowledge I pass on to you.

Watch the first ep, "Fire in the Hole", not expecting to fall in love, but for purposes of orientation. Give yourself a week, even a month, to let it breathe and twist a little in your subconscious. Then plunge back in with the mid-season episode called "Hatless", which is really where the series moves past its birthing pangs and starts to sail with new grace and humor. It's the episode where Raylan Givens, our Kentucky-born U.S. Marshall hero, he of the quick draw, deadly aim, and constant cowboy hat, loses the hat in a bar fight and is thrown off his game until he gets it back. If you don't fall in love then, keep with it, one after another, until you do. Because you will. My boyfriend resisted: what hillbilly, he said, would say, "I need to know what all transpired," instead of "What happened?" But that's just it: there's such an incredibly strong sense of place, --Harlan County and Noble's Holler and the Bennett stronghold,-- it all feels so real, and the way they talk is part and parcel of it. There was a time in the second season when a new, minor bad guy came onto the scene named, I don't know, Billy Ray Earl or something, and Raylan's first wry comment was, "Uh-oh. Three first names. That's never good." Then, when he went up to question Mags Bennett about the fellow she said, "Three first names. That's never good," the point being that, adversaries that they are, Raylan and Mags sprang up from the same soil, learned the same hard things, probably living within a few acres of one another, and the use of words and humor points that up.

And there is nothing in the world that's better than listening to Boyd Crowder while he's working a crowd into a lather over one thing or another.  Hillbilly drug dealer that he is, he's a genius when it comes to preaching.

So now I'm done with the third season. Each one is better than the last, so far. I'm half in love with Limehouse, and the final vanquishing of Quarles was mad, mad, epic and insane, and I mean that in a good way, in the very best.