The camera holds frame as a tall, dark man in a cowboy hat and boots walks away from us, as if he's stepping into the frame out of another picture entirely. The edges of the screen fill in with the scene around him: a South Beach pool party scene straight out of a Michael Bay movie. We follow him across the pool, cowboy boots smacking against the concrete. He sits down across from another dark man, this one slicked back and slippery. The slick man looks nervous but tries to hide it as the cowboy approaches. He invites the cowboy to join him for lunch.
The cowboy tells him there is still time. He's given the slick man 24 hours to leave town, and he's still got two minutes left. But if Slick is still in town when the 24 hours are up, he'll shoot him on sight.
I don't think I've ever been hooked on a television series faster than I was in those two minutes.
Timothy Olyphant stars as Raylan Givens, a U.S. Marshall who starts out of the Miami office, but quickly finds himself transferred to Kentucky near the town where he grew up.
That first scene is out of a different, but
equally fascinating show. It would have been a twist on the fish out of
water: Marshall Givens might look like he's out of place, but his
supreme cool tells us the real story: he isn't a fish out of water. He's
still in the water, and everybody else has been thrown in there with
him. It was not to be: Givens is not long for Miami, and finds himself
back in his old Kentucky home before the second act of the pilot. Before
the first hour is through, he'll once again find himself in a showdown
facing a deadline to leave town.
I've seen Olyphant in a few roles - about 15 minutes of that video game adaptation where he is bald, the ineffective villain in Live Free or Die Hard - and never felt I'd seen him in anything that suited him. That is, until I saw him in a cowboy hat.
I can't be sure that the show will live up to the promise of this first episode. What I can be sure of is this: think of the best combinations of actor and role of the past decade. I'm thinking Hugh Laurie as Dr. Gregory House, Kiefer Sutherland as Jack Bauer, Michael C. Hall as Dexter Morgan. Individually brilliant creations that shine in spite of the varying quality of the show surrounding them. Whatever happens around the periphery of Justified, I believe Timothy Olyphant as Raylan Givens is now on that list.
