Before I start this, one thing should be clear: I don’t watch Justified for the bloodshed. I think Raylan Givens, played by the show’s star, Timothy Olyphant, is a great television hero whom I like more for his charm than his badassery (though he’s pretty badass). The show’s villains generally make decisions based on actual human emotions rather than pure evil, and they are devious without relying too heavily on “oh shit!”–baiting gimmicks. And throughout this season, I was impressed by the incredible writing staff’s ability to think of new ways to make fun of Neal McDonough’s big stupid baby head.
I watch Justified for these reasons and many more.
That being said, a lot of people get killed on Justified.
Below is a list of everyone who died during Season 3. Obviously, there’s at least one spoiler in every entry.
The Harlan sheriff's election is resolved (for now), and Quarles continues his downward spiral in the latest episode of Justified, "Guy Walks Into a Bar."
The Shot
We start out with Raylan in the Raylan version of a tizzy over the imminent pardon and release of Dickie Bennett. Raylan first attempts to block the pardon through pro-Dickie witness Jed, bringing him into the office and playing on Jed's fears for his wife and daughter. But Jed holds firm, citing his family's debt to the Bennetts; Jed says that if Raylan can get his grandmother's consent, Jed will tell the truth about Dickie. Unfortunately for Raylan, Jed's grandmother is the Kentucky version of Breaking Bad's Hector Salamanca, not just because she's had a stroke and uses an alphabet board to communicate, but because she uses her injury to play at being weak while actually remaining a diabolical genius: She tricks Raylan into getting her two milkshakes, and then dumps one in Raylan's lap, smirking. Yeah, that's a hostile witness. (And a waste of a perfectly good milkshake!)
Quarles's operation gets a little smaller, while the Crowders' gets a little bigger, in this week's episode of Justified.
The Shot
The episode starts with Art telling Raylan that, in the absence of any evidence that Quarles is in violation of federal law, Raylan needs to back off ... which obviously means that the episode has to end with Raylan starting to close in on Quarles (on a tip from Boyd, whom Raylan gets out of jail as a favor to Ava). But getting there is a little complicated.
People get framed for things, alliances shift, and Wynn Duffy ... dyes his hair?! All this and more in "Watching the Detectives," the latest episode of Justified.
The Shot
It turns out that when Quarles tracked Gary down in Oklahoma, it wasn't just to have a nice drink: It was so he could throw Gary in the trunk of a car, drive him back to his former marital home, shoot him on the lawn, and make it look like Raylan did it. And this is AFTER Sammy Tonin's already faked a call, knowing the FBI is listening, in which he claims Raylan is dirty and working for Boyd. Basically, Raylan is twice-boned here. Actually, thrice: Not only did Quarles kill Raylan's ex's second husband and leave the gun out to be found, he loaded it with the bullet Raylan threw at Duffy earlier this season, so his fingerprints are on it. As frame jobs go, it's not bad. Anyway, Barkley backs off his pursuit of Raylan when it comes out that the intel suggesting that Raylan is dirty came from Tonin, and Raylan is temporarily cleared of Gary's murder ... but not before taking possession of the murder weapon from Winona, who found it in the freezer at her old house. Rather than dropping it off a bridge, as Winona suggests, Raylan keeps it — the better to use its existence as a threat against Duffy.
Watching the finale of American Horror Story, I figured — like many people probably figured — that Ben (Dylan McDermott) would be making a gory exit before the last commercial break. He had lost his wife in childbirth (along with one of their twins) in the same episode during which his dead daughter came out to him as a ghost, which is a lot to handle even if you’re a therapist with access to all sorts of serotonin reuptake inhibitors. That’s not to mention all of the guilt he felt from moving his family to the haunted mansion in the first place.
But he didn’t kill himself in the finale, though he thought about it in a series of Lifetime-network-style blurry shots of guns, wristwatches, and expository spirit monologues. Hayden (Kate Mara), with some help from a couple of the other evil spirit residents, hanged him from the chandelier over the stairs.
Courtesy of The New York Comedy Festival and Blake McElrath
First, it's time for another losing Thursday night football pick! I'm grabbing Jacksonville +12.5 points in Atlanta for the simple reason that the 2011 Falcons shouldn't be favored by that many points over anyone except the Rams and the Indianapolis Orlovskys.
OK, so last night was a big for the BS Report studio: the great Louis C.K. stopped by for a lively chat about his new comedy special ("Louis C.K.: Live at the Beacon Theater"), his superb FX comedy Louie, the story behind the famous Dane Cook episode, the ups and downs of his standup career, his creative process, and topics like "Why does Hollywood try to meddle so much with creative people?", "Can Chris Rock become a serious actor some day?" and "Is it OK to want to beat up kids in your daughter's school without actually beating them up?" Somehow we babbled on for two parts without ever mentioning Boston (he grew up there), the Celtics (he loves them) or boxing (his favorite sport). Maybe next time.
Ice Cube is developing his first television starring vehicle, a vigilante drama called Eye For an Eye, for FX. Cube would play a veteran paramedic who, after seeing years of bloodied victims, decides to go rogue as he lays down justice on perpetrators. If this show isn’t soundtracked exclusively by a continuous loop of NWA’s “Gangsta Gangsta," well, then, I’ll have lost all faith in FX’s clearance department. Grade: B+ [Deadline]
James Gandolfini's Attaboy Productions is adapting the French-Canadian comedy Taxi-22 as a potential starring role for Gandolfini, with Hung writer-producer Brett C. Leonard is writing the screenplay. The show, which would revolve around a politically incorrect New York City cab driver with some life struggles, has seen two previous writers, Kenneth Lonergan and Dave Flebotte, attempt scripts. If Leonard’s version isn’t up to snuff either, the folks at Attaboy are planning on printing out a transcript from a particularly juicy episode of Taxicab Confessions, scratching out the title, and hoping Gandolfini doesn’t notice. Grade: B+ [Deadline]
The Thanksgiving episode of The League (the show about friends in a fantasy sports league) that aired last night was one of the strongest episodes of any sitcom I've seen recently. Like the best outings of its FX sister shows Louie and It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, it was a perfect pitch delivered with intensity and precision, culminating in a series of escalating gags that made me laugh as hard as anything this year. It was another reminder that cable allows for possibilities even the new raunchier networks won't.
The problem with haunted-house stories are that the solution seems so obvious: just leave the house. Put it on Craigslist and find a good real estate agent sometime between after the faucet starts leaking blood and before you ever explore the screams coming from the basement. Sell your car and move into a beige condo with one bathroom. Leave while you have your life, and figure the rest out later.
American Horror Story, however — the everything bagel of haunted-house sagas — seems a more relevant and less impossible scenario now than it ever would have before: it is more difficult to leave a house, if you’re lucky enough to be in the shrinking group of people who have the money and confidence to buy one in the first place, than it was before the housing crisis began. Selling your home, especially one with jars of babies in the basement and constant solicitations from a disfigured man who needs money for his acting head shots, is difficult; finding another place while your haunted mansion sits on the market makes the reluctance to leave even more forceful. The Harmons, the family around which AHS revolves, are struggling financially, and of course, like many supernaturally staged homes with kitchen islands of horror, the house has an additional psychological pull on them that makes them stay. Dylan McDermott’s character Ben runs his psychiatric practice from the house, no longer able to afford an office, and it would be understandably difficult to see patients in a tiny corporate apartment. They’re stuck — stuck in a modern way.
Matthew McConaughey will star alongside Gerard Butler and Sam Worthington in Thunder Run, an adaptation of David Zucchino's book Thunder Run — The Armored Strike to Capture Baghdad about the three-day assault at the beginning of the Iraq War. Here’s the thing, though: This will be a 3-D CG movie that will use facial-capture technology and green-screen technology to create a unique effect. “What we capture in our cameras will be them,” explains producer Brian Presley. “It’ll have a stylized effect to it but we are shooting them.” “That means when CG Matthew McConaughey takes his shirt off, the real Matthew McConaughey has also taken his shirt off,” Presley did not add. Grade: B+ [HR]
Matt Damon will direct and star in a movie he co-wrote with John Krasinski, who will also star. (Krasinski came up with the idea, and developed it with Dave Eggers). Details have yet to be released, but the movie is in the vein of Erin Brockovich, and will feature Damon as a salesman who “arrives in a small town only to have his life changed.” That is certainly a lot of information to digest, so let’s focus on what’s really important: in the vein of Erin Brockovich? Finally, Matt Damon in a push-up bra! Grade: A- [HR]
Last week’s episode of Louie opened with a quasi simulation of his failed HBO show Lucky Louie, punctuated by Louis C.K. wearing a backward baseball cap and destroying the concept (and his hypothetical career) by questioning the realism of what they were doing. For maybe 90 seconds I found myself thinking, “Goddammit, here we go. This is it. This is going to be the first bad episode of Louie, because he’s going to obsess over something that’s essential only to him and not especially new and not even accurate (because the show he seemed to be satirizing wasn’t how Lucky Louie actually was).”
And then — of course — the episode changed. It didn’t just become unbad; it became incredible. The more I think about it, the more I suspect the interaction with Dane Cook might be the strongest seven-minute stretch I’ve ever seen on television: It’s realer than any reality show, more emotionally complicated than most 300-page memoirs, yet still awkward and severe and (somehow) easy to watch. I want to know everything about this scene — I want to know if this conversation truly happened, I want to know Cook’s views on his involvement, and I want to know C.K.’s deeper intent. And I can tell I’m not the only one who feels this way. What’s so distinctly compelling about this season of Louie is how everyone seems to collectively realize that what C.K. is doing is not only cool, but also authentically artful and unnaturally profound. There’s no debate over its value because there’s no contradictory position to take. It’s not polarizing in any important way: If you’re watching this show, you intuitively know it's fantastic (and substantially unlike the way fantastic TV typically is).
In a move sure to send their nascent stock offering plummeting, AMC has begun a dangerous game of hardball with one of its signature, non-boring shows. According to the L.A. Times, negotiations between the network and Sony Television over the fifth (and planned final) season of Breaking Bad have soured, with AMC reportedly asking for budget cuts and fewer episodes. Sony, no doubt aware of the millions of dollars in grooming costs saved when they shaved Bryan Cranston’s head, have responded by quietly shopping the show to other networks. While the idea of Heisenberg peddling his wares elsewhere come 2012 is far-fetched, we thought it best to imagine some potential landing spots for the series — and subsequent demographic tweaks — just in case.
