TV #43 of 2023: Justified: City Primeval, season 1 This eight-episode miniseries roughly works as a standalone crime drama, but it doesn’t feel much like Justified. And by pedigree, it isn’t: it’s an adaptation of an unrelated Elmore Leonard novel, onto which Raylan Givens has been somewhat awkwardly grafted as a new protagonist for this …
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TV #60 of 2021: Justified, season 6 There are elements in Justified that have kept me from ever wholly embracing the show, but it goes out on perhaps its finest run yet, an operatic movement that delivers poetic justice to most of our major players. True to its roots in the fiction of Elmore Leonard, …
TV #48 of 2021: Justified, season 5 A very meandering plot, especially after the intricate construction of the Drew Thompson case last season. The Crowes are more bumbling sideshow than credible threat to anyone, and too much screentime is dedicated to Ava’s stint in a women’s prison — a pretty blatant ripoff of Orange Is …
TV #38 of 2021: Justified, season 4 As usual, I am torn on how I feel about this show. On the one hand, the fourth season has a more relaxed tone that I personally think is a better fit for its particular strengths than the urgent plotting of previous years. The Drew Thompson case carries …
TV #27 of 2021: Justified, season 3 Structurally, I can admire the way that this season brings its various story threads crashing together at the end, but I’m increasingly thinking that the larger series is just not a great fit for me. Even setting aside the copaganda aspects and the fact that the program continues …
TV #19 of 2021: Justified, season 2 I like the idea of the Bennett hillbilly crime family — as well as Margo Martindale’s powerhouse portrayal of its cagey yet honorable clan matriarch — but the surrounding plot is messy and uneven, and a number of writing decisions leave me frustrated. I don’t mind making the …
TV #4 of 2021: Justified, season 1 I’m not thrilled with the first hour of this show about a trigger-happy US Marshal, which has a whole lot of white supremacist violence and rhetoric used as an apparent shorthand for villainy, I assume so that audiences can know which group of white gentiles are the good …
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