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TV Tonight: Justified

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Tonight FX debuts Justified, its Elmore Leonard-based US marshal drama starring Timothy Olyphant. I liked what I’ve seen a lot, and my review ran long enough ago that I figured I should point you to it again:

It seems like TV networks have been talking about remaking the western for longer than they actually made them. Maybe the genre, which dominated TV drama in the ’50s and ’60s, is just too much of its time to thrive in a more gray-hatted era. HBO aired three seasons of Deadwood, a dark and poetic look at the Darwinian life of a mining camp, but that was less a remake than a rebuttal.

TV has taken stabs at making westernish series, however. The excellent but short-lived Firefly, for instance, was essentially a western set in space. And now, with the terrific new drama Justified (which debuts March 16), FX and author Elmore Leonard have taken a crucial figure from westerns — the haunted lone gunslinger — and plopped him in 21st century Kentucky. …

Read the rest here, and let me know what you think of the show tonight.