Feels like home: why you should be watching “Justified”

Now that “Mad Men” is off duty until 2012, “Justified” is officially my favorite TV show currently airing. Three-quarters of the way through the second season, I find myself thinking about why. There are the obvious reasons. Good writing. Timothy Olyphant. But an exchange I read today in the comments of a recent episode recap may have distilled things for me:

I didn't know that harlan was a real place. [Note: this would be like me saying I didn’t know Westchester County is a real place.]

I think the phrase "gun thug" comes from this doc. [“Harlan County, USA”]

I just recently saw Harlan County USA, and I was enormously amused by the colloquial use of "Gun thugs." Anybody else really heard of a gun thug before they started talking about Tommy Bucks in the pilot? Not me. But consistently throughout the series, they've been able to fold gun thugs into the narrative, without really saying exactly what the fuck a gun thug is. I'm consistently amused by this, I guess like shitbird in Ellroy novels & The Wire. I guess it's just a thing in Harlan. [You were "enormously amused" to learn a new word, potty-mouth? I'll bet I have a few I could teach you.]

I've read a lot of Elmore Leonard novels, but I can't specifically remember reading that phrase in any of them. I first heard it in a Woody Guthrie song, "1913 Massacre" - "The gun-thugs they laughed at their murderous joke/While the children were smothered on the stair by the door."

Head-shaking hilarity. Because just a few minutes into “The Spoil,” I said to myself – direct quote – “Boyd Crowder is a gun thug for the Company?” only to hear a variant of that exact statement said twice in this episode. This is what I mean by great writing. It’s not just that the plots and characters are well drawn, it’s that they ring true to an Appalachian-American like myself. And the befuddlement of some non-Appalachian-Americans over terms like “gun thug” (Elmore Leonard invented it! No, it was Woody Guthrie!) is proof that the “Justified” show-runners know what they’re doing.

I was wary of “Justified” because I’m wary of any Hollywood-produced product that takes place in the South or deals with Southerners, just because they tend to screw us up. We’re not unique in that – any population that falls outside of the L.A./Northeast media sphere might as well be in Siberia given how well it’s understood. But “Justified” pretty much nails it. For instance:

- Accents. No one who’s supposed to be from Kentucky sounds like he or she is from Savannah. And not everybody sounds the same, reflecting their different education levels and experiences.

- Black people. Yes, we have them.

- Yankees. We have a few of them, too.

- Yes, there are people living in shacks and single-wides. But there are also retired pro athletes living in McMansions.

- In one episode in the first season, Raylan said something about going to Hardee’s. Not Carl’s Jr. This might’ve won my heart forever.

(Also, coal, which is turning out to be a major issue in Season 2. When was the last time you saw a mainstream TV show acknowledge the impact of our country’s energy industry on workers and the environment, especially in Appalachia? Hell, it took the New York Times two weeks to report on the 2008 coal ash spill outside of Knoxville.)

In short, “Justified” is a fun, well-acted show that wins major points from me for evoking an insular, complex area of the U.S. without ever mocking it. If you aren’t watching, you’re missing out.