Justified (series premiere, FX)

The new FX original series Justified is based on a character from some Elmore Leonard books I've never read. Given that I'm in no position to justify or falsify the show's fidelity to Leonard's conception of the soft-spoken, brutally righteous lawman Raylan Givens, I'm free from the obligation to fret about whether Graham Yost's television adaptation got this right or that wrong or had Givens in the wrong color of hat or had the mole on the wrong side of his cheek.

In the series premiere, Marshall Raylan Givens (played with a brooding charisma by Timothy Olyphant) gets himself into a peck of trouble in Miami by gunning down a bad guy in the middle of a ritzy hotel restaurant overlooking the ocean in South Beach. In defense of Givens, the restaurant was nearly empty (which beggared belief--I've never seen such a desolate restaurant in South Beach) and he had given the guy 24 hours to get out of town before he gunned him down. Still, there was a bit of fallout over the incident, the end result of which was Givens being shipped back to a district way the hell in Kentucky, a few miles from the town in which Givens grew up. The episode was engaging, well paced, and Walton Goggins was impressive making an appearance as the episode's primary antagonist, a profiteering Nazi sociopath with childhood ties to Givens. Goggins was a pleasant surprise, given how weak The Shield had been in its last two seasons and how often it felt like his only recourse as Shane was to season the scenery to his liking and start chewing.

The premiere of Justified contained the following:

Quiet violence
Black comedy
Scruff and stubble
Cowboy hats
A coquettish Southern femme fatale
A second, more tomboyish, femme fatale police officer
Fat, ugly Nazis
Less fat, but still quite ugly, Nazis
A gorgeous Southern Gothic vibe
A fairly respectable alt-country soundtrack

I'm extremely anxious to watch the 2nd episode.