Hacker Cinema
Justified
2010 · TV series · 6 seasons
Created by Graham Yost
A character drama based on the 2001 Elmore Leonard short story "Fire in the Hole." Leonard's tale centers around U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens of Kentucky, a quiet but strong-willed official of the law. The tale covers his high-stakes job, as well as his strained relationships with his ex-wife and father.
8 positive2 neutralfrom 10 commenters
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12 comments on Hacker News
I went into Lost thinking it was sci-fi, but in the end, it was all fantasy. So for me, Lost never really answered its core mysteries and that was before it threw in the whole purgatory flash-sideways stuff. I did actually start to lose interest because it felt like the show was stringing us along, but hung in there for answers. Instead I felt like all I got were narrative dead ends and then a conclusion where most of them die. It was immensely unsatisfying.
(I'm reflecting back now on 15 year old memories. I'm actually surprised to learn it aired from 2004-2010. Gosh, I remember this as being a show from the 90s.)
It's also not like there were a lot of options for other shows to watch at the time. I'd never stay with a show like Lost today. I punted on Yellowjackets as soon as it started bringing fantasy into the story.
You have to know that how a series wraps up is important to its viewers. A great or terrible finale can make or break how a show is later perceived. The Lost finale was the most disappointing of any show I've seen.
Great finales I recall are The Americans and Justified.
A terrible last book chapter or poor movie ending can ruin all that has come before for me. When deciding whether to read a book, I'll read the last chapter first. Spoilers don't ruin good stories for me. But bad conclusions do. And Lost's conclusion was just terrible. I'd rather it have been canceled.
It's not like I need literal answers for everything. I love Mulholland Drive. But I felt like Lost spent six seasons just jerking me around.
$0.02.
> There’s something seriously brainwashed about looking at what’s at offer today and still concluding that because the Sopranos exists we’re still producing good content.
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
The Wire
You're the Worst
The Good Place
Too many decent-to-great sitcoms and sketch-comedy shows to list.
Ditto adult animated shows.
Justified
Evil
Several great limited series (e.g. The Haunting of Hill House)
I could keep going. The last couple decades have given us a lot of really good shows since The Sopranos. I watch a fair amount and still have a backlog of probably-great stuff I haven't gotten to yet (including, actually, The Sopranos!) and continue to stumble on shows I've never even heard of that turn out to be really good.
The books are better than the TV shows, and the main character is not a "hillbilly" by any means.
Agree that Justified is a very well done show.
I have also been enjoying Wynonna Earp, which is kind of like Justified meets Ash vs Evil Dead.
From my point of view the problem manifests in this way: I simply don't bother to invest the time to watch new shows until it's clear that they're going to get a proper run that allows them to finish well (Breaking Bad, Justified; even Sons of Anarchy, which was a real slog for the last 3 seasons, ended well).
I'm tired of investing time in shows that Netflix simply drops: The Expanse (though now thankfully picked up by Amazon), Designated Survivor, and Shooter (although that was total crap, especially after season 1) spring immediately to mind, but there have been plenty of others.
I also won't bother starting to watch shows that I know Netflix have cancelled before they've concluded (e.g., Glow), because what's the point? And this is starting to severely erode the value of Netflix's library to me.
Things that have worked incredibly well on Netflix are shows that tell self-contained stories within a single season, like Narcos or Fargo, or shows that tell have a self contained but are able to tell it in a longer form than feature film would allow. The canonical example of the latter for me is Godless, which is one of the best shows on TV, I think. Genuinely fantastic.
And this last point leads on to another, which others have made: US TV series are too long, typically 18 - 24 episodes per season, multiple seasons, often too bloated with filler episodes, and often suffer from ridiculous over-plotting after the first few seasons, which comes off as aimless thrashing around: Prison Break (season 3 onwards: just utter nonsense), 24 (SPOILER ALERT: I mean, seriously, WTF was that Tony Almeida betrayal storyline all about in, I think, the final season - multiple sharks were jumped and I'm still pissed off about it).
On the flipside UK TV series are often too short: 6 half-hour episodes is still quite typical, so you're only really getting into a show and then suddenly the season ends. With that said, for some shows this has been made to work really well: Line of Duty, or the earlier seasons of Luther.
I do feel like, for many shows, a happy medium would be 10 - 12 hour long episodes. You could then afford to make a much more polished product, whilst still probably investing quite a bit less.
With regard to Game of Thrones, I don't think the article argues that it necessarily got better in quality season by season but that it took a couple of seasons to find a massive viewership and become a cultural phenomenon. That said, I think the quality did improve between season 1 and 5.
And I vehemently disagree with the notion that "almost all shows get significantly worse". There are definitely many shows that do jump the shark at some point and significantly drop in quality. On the flip side, there are many examples of shows that needed a couple of seasons to find their tone and really hit their stride which they most likely never would have had the chance to do at Netflix. E.g: Parks and Recreation, Community, Justified, even Breaking Bad imho.
Breaking Bad spun off Better Call Saul, which I really hope they wrap up in Season 5. The Americans and Justified are two other shows that ended when they should have. Fargo is a fresh story every season, so it can probably go on a bit longer. Fleabag was a perfect two season show.
Thanks for sharing your experiences. I've never visited Appalachia, and I'm afraid my views are filtered through popular media. But even if a TV show like "Justified" (I've seen the first 3 seasons) bends to narrative constraints, I felt it took its setting and the people living there seriously. I'm sure I'm missing a lot though.
Another piece of media that I felt was a strong statement about Appalachia is Ever South[1] by Drive-by Truckers.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwM2yd2QZ2Q - live rendition at KEXP
Let me offer you Justified as a rare exception. Possibly the most satisfying ending to any TV show I've watched.
This is true, but “toxicity” seems to arise much more frequently in some people than others.
In Robert Sutton’s book, “The No Asshole Rule”, he describes what it takes to be a “certified asshole”:
> A person needs to display a persistent pattern, to have a history of episodes that end with one “target” after another feeling belittled, put down, humiliated, disrespected, oppressed, de-energized, and generally worse about themselves.
Put another way, in the series “Justified”, Raylan Givens opines (paraphrasing here):
> If you come across an asshole in the morning, well, you just met an asshole. If you’re coming across assholes all day long, maybe _you’re_ the asshole.
Assholes at work create a genuinely toxic work environment. People get sick, quit, and even commit suicide.
It can be argued, with some merit, that this differs from the Internet in that the assholes are usually in a position of power to abuse their subordinates, while on the Internet - at least in chat rooms and the like - people can withdraw from hateful environments by just closing the tab on the browser.
That’s not my point, though; I’m asserting that people who show a “persistent pattern” of promoting hatred of particular groups, inciting violence, and convincing people of harmful information through lies, half-truths, and myths, deserve to be labeled as “toxic”, and can be far more dangerous to society than a common or garden corporate asshole, because their messages can - and do - influence millions of people towards antisocial or, at very least, irrational thoughts and activities.
I've enjoyed his prose for exactly these reasons, though he's not a favorite author or anything.
If you're a film buff, you can thank him for Quentin Tarantino + Joel & Ethan Coen.
If his story-telling philosophy sounds appealing, check out Justified. It's a TV show loosely based on some of his characters, but it's written like a love letter to his work. It finished just after his death, and was refreshing to watch right around when the concept of "prestige" TV started to collapse into itself / constant navel gazing trying to be the next Breaking Bad. There's a lot to take in about modern Appalachia (it takes place in rural Kentucky), but there's no heavy-handed metaphors. It's not trying to be a Greek tragedy or a Dickens novel, just razor-sharp dialog and fun action that somehow adds up to more than the sum of its parts.
You are probably right. The original content is outstanding- and I should probably consider the film catalog as a nice to have. Some TV series have seasons missing (presumably due to licensing issues) which can be a frustratring (this was the case for the excellent 'Justified' and 'Peaky Blinders' in the UK).
> Most movies / tv shows are already currently available digitally or without DRM (Netflix, Hulu, Apple, Amazon, etc).
NO. NO. NO. Where did you get this information? It might be that the US of A is nearing such a state of affairs, but over here in Europe, these services are either not available or devoid of content.
For instance, I like to follow Continuum, Justified and Game of Thrones. The only one of these that is available online over here is Justified.
"Watchever", the service that carries it, however, is crippled by weird licensing deals where seasons of TV series appear and disappear seemingly at random, because they only get the rights for a limited amount of time. So if I get a Watchever subscription, I _might_ be able to watch Justified _some of the time_.
As for the other two, they are just not available online. The poor sods that can stand to watch it in the dubbed version with commercial breaks will get to see both series on free TV with a delay of more than a year.
There is no reason to assume that watching Game of Thrones with a one year delay is problematic in any way. After all, everybody (in Germany) watches it at the same time, one year later, right?
For GoT there is actually a third option. I can get a subscription with Sky for 35€ per month, where I'll get tons of sports television and one TV series of interest: Game of Thrones.
Oh, and that subscription? First time you can cancel it is after 24 months. So if I want to watch two seasons of GoT, it'll cost me a mere 840€.
Do you see the problem here? If HBO were to shut up and take my money, I'd gladly pay ten bucks per episode to stream it. But that would be soooooo 21st century, wouldn't it?