Verified by 
Key points
- For many, watching Justified feels calming and therapeutic.
- This is accomplished through savvy applications of universality and the freedom afforded by displacement.
I’ve tried to write about FX’s Justified about a thousand times.
That’s including the eight times over the last two weeks. It was then that I gave myself permission to rewatch the entirety of the original show. I figured I should do this before I check out the reboot. This will be my third or fourth watching, I’ve kind of lost track.
Justified is genuinely therapeutic for me. It’s my go-to program. When I need to get my head straight, I do my best to be as eloquent as Boyd, as decent as Art, as calm as Tim, as wise as Rachel, as sardonic as Wynn, as brave as Ava, as practical as Ellstin, and as old-soul-coolest-dude-on-TV as Raylan Freakin’ Givens.
I find my affection for Justified vexing. This is despite that even a cursory look at entertainment headlines makes it clear that my position is not solitary. The New York Times noted after the first season, “The more or less good guys and the more or less bad guys often share a joking camaraderie, and everyone is sympathetic in some degree, however small.” Already that sounds like my kind of show. I love stories and I love ambiguity. That’s part of its special charm. That review, however, pales when juxtaposed with the more glowing commentary from 2012. In that piece, the Times lauded the writing and referred to the show as “oddly captivating.” I totally share that sentiment. It’s just strange that I should feel this good after watching. I’ve written about Breaking Bad, Friday Night Lights, Madmen, and The Walking Dead. In all of that hand waving, I’ve been pretty adept at pinning down what it is about each that worked for me. But there’s something about Justified I just can’t quite make sense of. How do I explain my absolute certainty that I am calmer and more measured after I watch just a single episode of a not-altogether happy or peaceful narrative?
This one tiny scene, which you can find here, is perhaps the best scene I’ve ever seen on any screen. We ought to sip it and let it tickle our throats, just like all that fine bourbon that’s sacrosanct to the very character of Harlan County, where Justified takes place. Watch the scene and wait a few minutes before doing anything else. The nuance, the pathos, the humor—it’s sublime.
Explaining why Justified is compelling is like trying to tell someone why a mountain or a valley can be so utterly captivating. An explanation won’t bring any great satisfaction. We can throw some words around, talk about the ways that the clouds cling to a pinnacle, or that you can find a million shades of green in the valley, but none of those descriptions will come close to bringing about the Zen-like satisfaction of the scene itself. Those landscapes are transcendent.
Many will understandably argue that this kind of praise ought to be reserved solely for the grandness of art or the majesty of nature. A show about a Federal Marshall in rural Kentucky? Can it really be placed in the same category as a mountain top or the Mona Lisa? Isn’t that a bit of an overstatement?
Probably.
I feel what I feel. I like walking in the woods, I like art galleries. And I like watching Justified. And I like all of those things for the same reasons. Go back and watch that scene again. Break it down. You’ve got the kindness of Art going back to get the old man’s oxygen. There’s the earnestness of the old guy’s elopement, moving as fast and as worthlessly as his elderly legs will carry him. You’ve got a reference to the simplicity of a great scene from Jaws, and it is worth noting and entirely relevant that there’s no sleight of hands in that Jaws scene, just as there are no special effects that call for superhuman strength from either of the men in this montage. They’re old, and they know they’re old, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not gonna try. The first one’s gonna run and the second one’s gonna chase.
It’s a story as old as the Bible—probably older. And there’s the perfect song in the background, the simplicity of the ukulele, and the resigning lyrics about “knocking on closed doors.” Gently, we are reminded of both the longing for more options in our lives and a kind of peaceful surrender to the laws of nature; we close one door when we open another. That’s the way it is and that’s the way it’ll always be. No multiverse or time travel or any other science fiction-like gimmick. You get one shot. This is grown-up stuff, couched as a neo-Western.
And that is the term that explains why this works. It’s a neo-Western. You’ve got a big Stetson hat and a handsome gunslinger, but things are thematically murky. Even though Olyphant’s Raylan Givens is often compared with Gary Cooper's characters, this isn’t High Noon. In High Noon, there’s almost no sympathy for anyone except the Sherriff and his newly wedded bride. Don’t get me wrong, I love High Noon. But compare this scene from High Noon with this one from Justified. You could argue that the comparison is apples and oranges, but it’s the feelings I’m trying to get at. I feel tense in that High Noon scene, and I’d guess some folks would remind me that Westerns are all about feeling tense. On the other hand, if the scene from Justified were in an old-school Western, there’s no way Givens gets his hat back without a tussle. Fists would fly at the very least. But here, the sometimes-bad guys just do the right thing. In Justified, the bad guys can be surprising and unpredictable, and that’s no different from the good guys. That begs the question of how one defines good guys and bad guys in the first place. It also begs how we define when extreme actions are, well, justified.
Ultimately, the salve that Justified affords rests soundly on what Irvin Yalom called the Principle of Universality. Yalom noted helping others to recognize their similarities was a key step toward inner peace. Most people assume that they are "unique in their wretchedness," he wrote. While we all have our unique differences, our suffering, and our triumphs have more in common than we realize or even expect. Justified helps me to remember this. Add to this a healthy dose of displacement, and one finds the perfect recipe for affiliative feelings toward one another. A good program allows us to place ourselves in every character's shoes. In this way, we can explore what makes us unique and what makes us stay connected. That feeling, that we can stay connected, is what keeps me calm.
Our world has always been complicated, but the internet and social media and the desire to always be on camera or online (the usual bogeymen of the 21st century) have made our complicated world a never-ending barrage that can be hard to turn off. In these frenzied times, writers sometimes turn to the binary starkness of good versus evil to move stories forward. We all know that things are more complicated than a simple morality tale, or, to put it another way, there’s nothing that’s ever been simple about morality. I’m tired of dealing with these complications by focusing on the extremes. That feels, paradoxically, like more work.
I keep asking myself in those tales why everyone is so worked up and exaggerated. The remedy, it seems to me, isn’t to portray pure good or pure evil. The remedy is to remind ourselves that we have a whole lot more in common than we don’t. That’s the magic here. Art and Rachel and Wynn and Tim and Boyd and Ava and Winona—all of them. They’re more alike than they are different. I am aware that this is also not a particularly revelatory theme. But through Givens’s eyes, it’s done so unbelievably coolly. And staying cool these days is hard. At the end of the day, that’s why I watch Justified.
