It's also impossible to talk about Dad TV without mentioning Yellowstone. Creator Taylor Sheridan's debut series, Yellowstone is much more of a slow burn than Reacher, but it is by no means less thrilling. Old-school cowboy living may be dying, but in John Dutton's world, frontier justice lives on. Though Yellowstone's ending was sullied by Kevin Costner's early series exit, the franchise is still wildly popular, with Marshals and the upcoming Dutton Ranch further continuing the saga.
FX's Justified combines the best of Reacher and Yellowstone, making for a Western series unlike anything 21st-century television has ever seen. Justified ran for six incredible seasons and spawned a sequel revival miniseries, Justified: City Primeval, in 2023. Based on stories by Elmore Leonard, Justified follows Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant), who uses an Old West-style to keep the peace in a lawless modern-day Kentucky. Yellowstone may be credited as reviving the neo-Western TV show, but Justified remains the genre's crowning achievement.
Justified Perfectly Combines Classic Western Sensibilities With Modern Thrills
Like Jack Reacher, Raylan Givens is a lone wolf antihero, yet he's perfectly at home in both the TV Western and the prestige crime drama that rose to prominence in 21st-century television. A gunslinger who shoots from the hip, Raylan's frontier justice brand of law enforcement is more in line with the white hats of the 1800s than it is in contemporary Harlan County, Kentucky.
However, while Raylan embodies the ways of the past, Justified's action scenes are as fast-paced as they are brutal, making them some of the best in modern television. If Yellowstone is grit and Reacher is brute force, then Justified is intensity, a trait essential to making a neo-Western series work.
As much as Raylan represents the timeless antihero, like any great Western show, Justified's success hinges on its villains. A modern series to its core, Justified's villains come in the form of drug dealers, corrupt politicians, and white supremacists, with Walton Goggins' Boyd Crowder serving as Justified's overarching antagonist. Raylan's childhood best friend, Boyd is a funhouse mirror version of who the Timothy Olyphant character would have become had he chosen the outlaw path.
Whether directly lifted from Elmore Leonard's prose or inspired by his writing style, many have described Justified's dialogue as "hillbilly Shakespeare". Whereas Reacher's is functional and meant to set up the action, and Yellowstone's has a tendency to veer toward melodrama, the characters of Justified, particularly Raylan and Boyd, are locked in a constant, heated game of verbal chess, making the show's dialogue-driven scenes as thrilling as its action sequences.
This is also what makes Justified so appealing to both Western and non-Western fans alike. So, if you want a smarter version of Reacher — or just need something to tide you over until season 4 — and you enjoyed Yellowstone but think that Taylor Sheridan tarnished its legacy, Justified may just be your next favorite show.
Release Date
2010 - 2015
Directors
Adam Arkin, Jon Avnet, Peter Werner, Bill Johnson, John Dahl, Michael W. Watkins, Dean Parisot, Gwyneth Horder-Payton, Tony Goldwyn, Don Kurt, Michael Katleman, Billy Gierhart, Frederick King Keller, John David Coles, Lesli Linka Glatter
Writers
Fred Golan, Taylor Elmore, Ingrid Escajeda, VJ Boyd
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Timothy Olyphant
Raylan Givens
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English (US) ·