Timothy Olyphant’s Justified Improves With Time
It’s 2010 in Miami. U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens walks onto a hotel swimming pool deck, sits at a table across from a criminal named Tommy Bucks and warns him to leave town — then uses a tablecloth trick to prompt a fatal confrontation that immediately establishes the show’s tone: quick, lethal and unmistakably Justified.
Often cited as part of a recent renaissance of TV Westerns, Justified stands out among neo-Westerns. Based on Elmore Leonard’s stories, the series stars Timothy Olyphant as Raylan Givens with Walton Goggins appearing as a recurring villain, and across its six seasons none scored lower than 90% on Rotten Tomatoes, with three seasons reaching a perfect 100%.
The series blends genre staples — the skilled gunslinger, a compelling antagonist, Eastern Kentucky’s frontier mentality, poetic dialogue and thorny moral dilemmas — and leans heavily on performance.
United States, Miami