The first episode of FX’s new show Justified was really pretty great, even though I spent a good twenty minutes just wishing Deadwood hadn’t been cancelled. If you don’t know either of those shows, the relevance of my desire is that Timothy Olyphant, protagonist of the new Elmore Leonard adaptation, plays a character quite similar to his role on Deadwood as Sheriff Seth Bullock: US Marshal Raylan Givens and Sheriff Bullock are both reserved, concise, manly men, decked out with firearms and many-galloned hats, who believe in justice as administered according to their own rules of law. The two characters are really the same man in a lot of respects, except that Raylan lives in a time and place that no longer allow for one man to capture and punish bad guys however he sees fit.

Timothy Olyphant as Raylan Givens

This makes the connections between the two shows all the more fascinating, particularly because Justified also recalls Deadwood’s careful attention to a specific breed of Americana. After a serious misstep on the job in Miami, Givens gets reassigned back to his home town in Kentucky, where the villages he needs to visit aren’t even entered into the GPS, and a nasty gang of neo-Nazis has taken over the county. In this respect, too, Justified echoes some of the central themes of Deadwood – this place is un-mapped, out of sync with the rest of the country, and dominated by a few powerful individuals. While not as intensely idiosyncratic as Deadwood, Harlan County also has its characteristic language and patterns of dialogue (although this may have more to do with Leonard’s influence than specific Kentuckyisms).

Timothy Olyphant as Seth Bullock

It’s not hard to make these comparisons and they’re certainly not the most insightful form of criticism, but Justified comes into its own more clearly when seen in contrast to a show like Deadwood. Seth Bullock is an integral part of Deadwood, one part of an enormous cast, where he’s definitely not the most charismatic figure of the bunch, or even the most influential. Sheriff Bullock was an expected and respected part of his community, but Raylan is an antique. Somehow, he’s strolled right out of a nineteenth-century Western and into a story where the cops can’t shoot people on the spot and criminals use rocket launchers to blow up churches. (To be fair, they also rob banks, which is a pretty classic Western trope). The pilot episode mediates this somewhat by introducing Givens in a high-end Florida hotel, where he fits in as well as a down-and-out NYC cop who’s been unexpectedly transported into a sci-fi flick. He’s so out of place there, that by the time he shows up in Kentucky and his boss shrugs off some of Given’s eccentricities, they seem a bit more reasonable. Still, the impact on the show’s structure is quite clear: while Deadwood was about an entire American frontier town, Justified is built on one man who was clearly born in the wrong century. A pretty badass man, by the way, and I did mention he wears a giant hat, right?

Always gotta keep an eye out for the neo-Nazi redneck gangs

I enjoyed the pilot a great deal, and for a show that is going to live and die with its protagonist, I think Timothy Olyphant carries the role incredibly well. I haven’t read any of the Elmore Leonard books with Raylan Givens in them, but I do wonder a little how his character will evolve. So often on television, protagonists shift less through what they do in the primary timeline of the show, but more through our perception of them as we learn about their pasts. I’m thinking primarily here of what we slowly learn about Don Draper on Mad Men, but also revelations about Tony Soprano’s childhood, Omar Little and his relationship with Butchie on The Wire – heck, Lost built several seasons on that exact narrative technique. Raylan needs some of that backstory, and Justified looks primed to give it to us, with the pilot dancing around repeated references to Raylan’s father. But I’m seriously curious about what that backstory might be. How does a man end up in the twenty-first century as a nineteenth-century lawman? At the moment, the character seems so much like he’s just stepped out of a stagecoach and into a town car, it’s hard to imagine what that development could look like. I’m looking forward to finding out.