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" Justified has always been a sleeper show, somewhat lost in the shadow cast by Mad Men and the other heavy-duty dramas that have flourished in the current golden age of cable television. Critics have, for years, argued that this show is just about to come into its own, and it has still largely remained a critical rather than a commercial success. Against experience, then, I believe that Justified is now \u2014 really, I mean it \u2014 about to become one of the biggest shows on television. There are a couple of reasons why it&amp;#039;s different this time. The first is that the show has become way, way better. (The two episodes that start the fourth season, premiering Tuesday night on FX, are the two best episodes in the show so far.) And the second reason is that the subject of Justified&amp;#039;s obsession, guns and who has the right to use them, is swiftly becoming America&amp;#039;s obsession.  Guns are everywhere in Justified. The show is loosely based on a single Elmore Leonard short story, about a federal marshal in Kentucky who has a tendency to overuse him firearm in the line out of duty, though the show has since moved on from such plain roots. The new season has a main plotline that&amp;#039;s closer to Paul Auster than Elmore Leonard: A man falls out of the sky with a bag of cocaine and a driver&amp;#039;s license belonging to a man named Truth. But still, even the title itself implies the discharge of a weapon. The show&amp;#039;s hero, Raylan Givens, comes from a lengthy tradition of trigger-happy cops. There are usually two ways to play this version of manliness: either strong and silent, like Dirty Harry, or dark and vulnerable, like every character in The Wire or really any other contemporary cop drama. Timothy Olyphant plays Raylan a little different, because he plays his vulnerability for comedy. He is damaged, he recognizes, but then he&amp;#039;s not particularly interested in doing anything about it. He is a man who seems perfectly aware that he is a screw-up and is willing to live with that reality.  This way of playing the character has particularly potent consequences given the context of the gun culture that permeates the show. The promotional material for Justified presents Givens brandishing pistols that look larger than his head. Another image simply shows the two rough barrels of a shotgun. Early in the first episode of the fourth season, a hooker shoots one of her customers when he comes into the room dressed as a bear. Her madam asks her, &amp;quot;Why do you have a gun?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Everybody has a gun,&amp;quot; she replies. Certainly everyone in Justified fits that description. When a cop flashes a knife, it&amp;#039;s a clear sign that he&amp;#039;s not really a cop or a man. In the second episode, a fourteen-year-old kid flashes a pistol. His grandmother asks, &amp;quot;What are you doing with a gun?&amp;quot; His father answers for him, &amp;quot;We talked it over, and we felt it was time.&amp;quot;  It would be quite easy to see Raylan Givens as an NRA hero, like Dirty Harry with his .44 Magnum. The NRA has proposed &amp;quot;good guys with guns&amp;quot; as a remedy to mass shootings, and Raylan Givens mostly fits that description. But the show is fortunately too sophisticated for a simplistic Manichean relationship to firepower. Everyone in the show has a gun, but the overwhelming feeling is that practically nobody should. Givens kills far too many people, and too casually. And mostly what the good guys do is take guns away from other people. The show&amp;#039;s basic tension is whether Raylan can talk the people he has to arrest out of forcing him to shoot them. Virtually every episode has its disarmament scene. It&amp;#039;s like Givens has never heard of the Second Amendment.  American popular culture is in an interesting transition in its relationship to guns at the moment, and Justified is right at the sweet spot. Several shows and movies produced before the shootings in Aurora and Newtown have had to try to deal with the fallout after the fact. Some, like Texas Chainsaw 3D, have simply failed, while others, like Gangster Squad, have had to be shut down and be retooled completely. This season of Justified was made before Newtown, but it&amp;#039;s had the good fortune to find its time afterward. It&amp;#039;s a show about people who love guns, and on the other hand, it&amp;#039;s a show about how guns need to be taken out of the hands of people who are crazy. In other words, it&amp;#039;s at the same crossroads as the rest of the country.  Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a17853/justified-season-4-review-14954262/>