Justified Binge-ing

Every year around this time, I binge on Justified, a TV show based on Elmore Leonard characters.  The acting, dialogue and all the rest is quite good.  It is not quite Breaking Bad/Mad Men/The Wire great, but it is a heap of fun.  I don't get FX on my Canadian satellite dish, so I have to wait until the previous season comes out on DVD, which, nicely enough, is right before Winterfest.  So, I get the disks as a gift and spend part of the holiday binge-ing on the season. 

I have just a few thoughts after the break:


The first is that this season seemed have more principal-agent problems and ones of greater severity per episode than previous seasons and in other TV shows.  Besides the Art-Raylan dynamic, there was Boyd who had to deal with being both agent and principal nearly all the time.  He kept losing control over the situation--with the dudes getting shot in Mexico, with the drugs going hither and yon, depending on the whims of the various agents.  There was Ava and her position at the bottom and top of various prison hierarchies.  There was even Theo Tonin and his folks.  I cannot remember a time where there were so many different chains of command in a television show or movie and where each one was being subverted/mismanaged/whatever pretty much all of the time.

The second thought is about the twenty one foot rule that Danny Dewey kept talking about.  It turns out that it is a real thing.  That is it is a real set of beliefs that Mythbusters addressed:

Can you bring a knife to a gun fight?  Maybe.  Of course, Danny was doomed in the show because Raylan can pull and shoot far faster than the Mythbusters dudes.  Not to mention that Raylan clicks off the safety long before he pulls.  Plus I think that Adam of Mythbusters has a lousy holster and a lousy technique. 

But I am no expert. I am just amused that Justified resolved its twenty one foot challenge, discussed all season long, in the most Elmore Leonard way possible. 

There is one season left of Justified, starting later this month.  I will be patient and wait until next Winterfest for my last batch of Justified disks.  The good thing is that The Americans is likely to continue for a few seasons, so I will have more binge-ing ahead not just this month but in the years to come.