Yost ‘n’ Translation

I wanted to wait until just the right moment to say something substantive about Elmore Leonard’s new Tuesday-night FX series Justified, and with this week’s fifth episode, “The Lord of War and Thunder,” I knew the moment had come. First, a quick word about the show’s other primary creative force, head writer Graham Yost, who gets the “developed for television by” credit and serves with Leonard as one of the executive producers. Yost has worked mainly in television, but did script a few features, including John Woo’s Broken Arrow (1996) and a little number called Speed (1994), which I loved, not least for putting poor, beloved, betrayed Sandra Bullock on the map (“Stay on or get off?”).

Rather than muddying my mental waters, I decided to wait until the season is over before I catch up on the literary exploits of Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (Pronto, Riding the Rap, and the show’s official source, “Fire in the Hole”), so I can’t say how well his backstory has translated to the screen. But since the show’s premise is that Raylan (the excellent Timothy Olyphant) has been reluctantly reassigned from Miami to his boyhood home in Kentucky coal-mining country, you just know those loose ends aren’t going to dangle forever. Back in the day, the stand-alone “monster of the week” episodes of The X-Files alternated with those detailing the show’s central, and ultimately unmanageable, mythology; similarly, Justified tacks back and forth between fugitive-of-the-week and backstory episodes concerning Raylan’s family and (sometimes former) friends.

“The Lord of War and Thunder” features Raylan’s oft-invoked but hitherto unseen father, an old reprobate named Arlo, who is prone to heart attacks and reportedly suffers from both bipolar and post-traumatic stress disorders. The show has already displayed a penchant for interesting guest casting, e.g., last week’s “Long in the Tooth,” which offered not only Speed’s Alan Ruck as Raylan’s quarry du jour but also a hilarious turn by Clarence Williams III, late of TV’s The Mod Squad and Twin Peaks and a frequent collaborator of John Frankenheimer’s. So it’s no surprise that Arlo is played by Raymond J. Barry—not exactly a household name…except in the Bradley household, since he was Senator Richard Matheson on The X-Files, in a nod by creator Chris Carter to the man whose Kolchak telefilms inspired the show.

I gather from some Internet comments that Justified is derived in large measure from Riding the Rap, and there is a precedent for adapting a Leonard novel episodically rather than as a film (the ill-fated Karen Sisco doesn’t count, as it was only spun off from Out of Sight). That would be the limited series Maximum Bob, which ran for seven weeks of glorious Twin Peaks-style weirdness during the summer of 1998, with the promise of a regular gig if it did well, which of course it didn’t, since I loved it. I remember the timing precisely, because that was the summer we sold our condo and bought our house, only our original deal fell through, forcing us to move twice and live for a single month in half of the duplex adjacent to my sister-in-law’s while we found another house.

The premature cancellation—or, in the case of Maximum Bob, non-continuation—of such shows as Twin Peaks, Karen Sisco, and Commander in Chief epitomized the fate of almost every show I’ve championed for decades, and made David-Lynch-abusing ABC second only to Carter-abusing Fox on the BOF merde-list. That’s why I gave up on dramatic television, watching only The Simpsons (since Fox criminally mishandled Futurama as well as the Carter oeuvre, not to mention cancelling Firefly and freakylinks), The Office, and its sister show, Parks and Recreation. That’s also why it took an artist of Leonard’s standing to get me to give it another try, and although I’m probably condemning Justified to an early death by watching and enjoying it, I’ll continue to do so as long as I can.