According to Justified showrunner Graham Yost, the FX series arguably wouldn’t exist if not for Scott Frank and John Landgraf.
The latter (and current head of FX) was a massive fan of the late author Elmore Leonard and wanted his network to be the home of Yost’s adaptation of Leonard’s Fire In the Hole novella. (The series, which ran for six seasons, would also adapt Leonard’s Riding the Rap novel for various storylines.) Landgraf also contributed a script to ABC’s Karen Sisco series, which starred Carla Gugino in the role of the titular U.S. marshal. Audiences previously saw Karen played by Jennifer Lopez in the 1998 film adaptation of Leonard’s novel Out of Sight.
That movie — specifically screenwriter Scott Frank’s adaptation of the source material — proved to be a constant creative touchstone that Yost and his fellow writers endeavored to reach as they told the violent and, at times, comical story of steely, Florida-based U.S. marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant). The pilot, “Fire in the Hole,” which aired 15 years ago on March 16, 2010, centers on Raylan struggling to dispense his particular brand of justice after shooting a gun thug in Miami gets him banished to the last place he wants to be: Harlan, Kentucky, his former hometown.
“We would often say and think to ourselves, ‘If we’re going to do this, then it has to be as good as what Scott Frank did with Out of Sight and Get Shorty,’” Yost tells the Television Academy in an exclusive interview celebrating the show’s 15th anniversary. “That was the benchmark for us.”
Yost, along with executive producer Fred Golan and writers like Benjamin Cavell, V.J. Boyd and Chris Provenzano, spent six seasons trying to meet that benchmark by navigating the tricky tone of Leonard’s work while putting Raylan and his small but very competent team of fellow marshals on the trail of some of TV’s most diabolical and charismatic villains. Those antagonists include Raylan’s loquacious “frenemy” and con man Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins) and season two’s crime family matriarch, Mags Bennett (played by Margo Martindale, who won an Emmy for her role). In fact, Boyd was originally intended to die in the pilot, but fate (and test audience scores) had different plans.
Early in its first season, Justified trafficked mostly in “case of the week” episodes before settling into a more serialized narrative — one full of weekly victories and season-long threats. The end result is one of FX’s most popular shows, and one that spawned a sequel of sorts in 2023, the Detroit-set Justified: City Primeval.
With Justified celebrating its 15th anniversary, Yost (in the first of a two-part interview) reveals why he chose FX over HBO when pitching the series and why production demands and rights issues led to changes to the pilot’s opening scene. Yost also reveals the circumstances that changed Boyd’s fate and that of the series.
Television Academy: For fans of the show, there’s a famous line in the pilot — “We dug coal together” — that would become a runner throughout the series between Raylan and Boyd. Was that something you planned, or did it just become “a thing” organically as the show went on?
Graham Yost: Only after we did it in the pilot. It wasn't planned. It's in the novella, I believe. And just jumping way ahead, the way that became the last line of the entire series was thanks to Walton.
How so?
He said, “What if we go through this, that and the other thing? And then Boyd says it, ‘We dug coal together.’” And then Fred Golan and I had a huge debate whether or not Raylan would [respond with] “That's right” or just nod. The debate was just — Raylan knows this is all a lie, right? He's lying to Boyd. He's come in to his old friend who he dug coal with, and he's telling him Ava's dead. His last thing to get in this is I'm going to protect Ava and her kid. He still has that deep bond with this guy, even though he's come to hate him more than anyone. And yet, there's still that thing — “We dug coal together.”
Now, going back to the pilot, how did you initially get involved with the show?
I had a deal at Sony; I owed them a script. Fred Golan and I had written a pilot for them. It didn't go forward, but part of my deal was another script. And I pitched them something they didn't care for. And they said, “Hey, we've got the rights to this Elmore Leonard novella.” And I was just like, “Well, I love Elmore Leonard. I've been reading him since at least the ‘80s. I just love him so much. And, at that point, I had probably read 15 of his books. Then I heard that [executive producers] Sarah Timberman and Carl Beverly were going to produce. I didn't know Carl [at the time]. [Pilot director] Michael [Dinner], I had heard of. He was going to direct it.
So you agree to adapt it, and what happens next? Did you go out and pitch the series?
We did the pitch trail. We went to nine places, I think. And six or seven of them wanted it. A couple didn't. And it was between — I think it was between HBO and FX. And the reason we went with FX is we knew how much John Landgraf wanted to do a really good Elmore Leonard show. He had worked on Karen Sisco when he was working at the time with [Danny] DeVito's company, [Jersey Films]. He even co-wrote an episode. And he loved Elmore. Loved Elmore. And I think he liked or knew of Boomtown. [Editor’s note: Yost previously created NBC’s Boomtown, a critically acclaimed, L.A.-based crime drama that ran for two seasons]. He also knew Michael, Sarah and Carl. So it was just like, this is the good group. And they had enough trust in me for some reason. But when we pitched to [John] and his team, he had all these questions about the show, and he said all of these things. And I said, “Well, shit, John, if I’d known you were going to say all that, I would have used that in the pitch at all the other places. [Laughs]”
So he just really responded to both the source material and what your take would bring to it?
He was so into what makes Elmore work and what the tone is that you're striking for, which is humanity and humor and terror and thrills and back to humor again.
So, honestly, my pitch was: I just really want to do the novella as the pilot, and I wanted to make some changes. I think [Raylan’s] father should be alive, I think his ex-wife should live in Kentucky and be remarried. And Raylan is not the Raylan in the stories who was in his mid-50s. It's Tim [Olyphant], who was in his 40s. But we didn’t know it was Tim in the role at that point. But, yeah, I was like, “Let’s just do the novella, and we’ll take it from there.”
And Elmore, he read the pilot script or watched the pilot and said, “I love it. It's great.” And I said, “Of course you do, Elmore. It's all you.” Which is to say that, when I was writing the pilot, there were times when I'd go, What's Raylan going to say next? And I was like, “Well, what would Elmore have him say next? Because he was great at his job.” That’s why, when we were making the show, we had bracelets made that said: “W.W.E.D?” — short for “What Would Elmore Do?”
The pilot opens with Raylan sitting down at a rooftop table at some restaurant in Miami, ready to draw on gun thug Tommy Bucks (Peter Greene), unless Tommy gets out of town. That scene instantly drops audiences into the tone you were speaking about earlier — was this scene in your original pitch?
So, there is an interesting thing there. In the novella, that whole scene comes up. It’s discussed. But it actually happens in the book Pronto. But we didn’t have the rights for Pronto. So we had to reconfigure it so that we weren't doing what Pronto did, which involved a table inside, and it was more people, and it was all this stuff. And then, partly, some changes were made because of [location] scouting. It was just Michael [Dinner] saying, “Let's do it on a rooftop. If we're going to South Beach, let's do rooftop, pool — the whole shmear. And let's see a guy in a cowboy hat walking through that.”
In the pilot script, there are additional characters in that scene, too: A woman named Gloria arrives with a beach bag, and there’s an informant there named Harry. How did you land on trimming all that away and just focusing on Raylan versus Tommy Bucks?
I think that part of cutting all of that was, “Okay, the Gloria stuff might have been a little too close for my comfort to the Pronto scene.” And it also, I think it might have been Michael, it might have been Tim [thinking]: We’re up on the rooftop, we have to focus it down. Because that's what the scene comes down to: two guys, and one of them is giving the other 24 hours to get out of town — which, in this context, was just fantastic.
Tommy Bucks also has this funny line about how what Raylan is doing is “supreme bullshit.” Did you write that or —
Yeah, that's Peter Greene. He was a little all over the place, but that was the magic of it. I mean, his energy was fantastic. And he really delivered this great character that you meet, and you want to see him die really fast. And we checked that box.
The pilot also introduces us to two key characters for the series, Boyd and his future wife in crime, Ava (Joelle Carter), who, when we meet her, has recently killed Boyd’s abusive brother with a shotgun. How did you land on Goggins and Carter for those roles?
Joelle was just casting. That was just her face came up on my computer screen and some people said, “Oh, of course you're married to a blonde. You want a blonde [for this part].” And I was like, “No, I just think she’s great and perfect for the role.” Also, there are so many people in the show who are from the South, or relative South. As a Canadian, I think everything South of the 49th parallel is the South. [Laughs] But Joelle could do the accent. The scene we auditioned for the role was when Ava first meets Raylan, and she talks about having just killed Boyd’s brother.
And with Walton, that was just FX. [They] said, “What about Walton Goggins?” We said, “Can we get him?” And they said, “Go for it.” And so we went to him, and he said yeah. Walton wanted to work with Tim. He wanted to work with Michael. He loved the character, but was very concerned about playing a Nazi. So we felt it was more interesting if his political [leanings] were all just of convenience. He didn’t really believe in them. He just used them so he could gather an army that could go rob banks for him, basically. And that's what he did. So, it was all just calculated on his part. Part of Boyd is — he's a great con man. He will get people swept up behind him.
Years after the series [wrapped], there was news about a coal strike in Harlan because they were shutting down a mine. And they were paying the lawyers before they were paying the miners. So they closed down the train tracks and blocked them so none of the coal could go out. And one of the calls that went out was “We need Boyd Crowder.” I mean, they loved him down there. That could have been a plot line if the show was still on.
The pilot ends on an emotional beat, where Raylan kind of breaks into the house that his ex-wife, Winona (Natalie Zea), shares with her husband, Gary (William Ragsdale), and Winona tells Raylan that he is “the angriest man” that she has ever known. How did you land on that being the final scene?
I think her line is what gave us the series.
So this is one of my joke stories of the whole thing, which is that FX wanted something more past the “We dug coal together” thing [between Boyd and Raylan]. And I originally wrote a scene where Raylan goes to see his father, and we just decided, “No, we do want the father to be a criminal. We want him to be a part of the show, but we don't want to just — we want to build up to it.” Our thinking was, we want to hear about the father for a few episodes. We wanted that to be a big thing.
So my joke was, I said, “Oh, you FX guys. You won't be satisfied until at the end of the show, Raylan goes home, he goes down to his basement, and he's got a 19-year-old boy chained to a wall.” And they laughed. But we ended up using that in the third season, when we introduced Neal McDonough's character [Quarles]. Of course, we put that in kind of as a reminder of where this thing started. But the ending of the pilot, I started thinking about Raylan and why he does what he does. I was thinking, “His father's a criminal, so Raylan decides to become a marshal. And he watched the TV shows. He watched things like Gunsmoke. He said, “I want to do that because I don't want to be [my dad]. Because that asshole beats my mother — who, in our story, is dead. So we created Aunt Helen, who is basically a maternal character that becomes very useful, especially in season two.
So Raylan makes this choice, and he seems really affable. And there is something about Tim in that he can do romantic, and he’s very funny, and he can be scary as hell. As [Deadwood’s] Seth Bullock, when he would just go dark, it was like, Oh, Jesus. So we knew we could pull this [final scene] off when we knew we were going to get him for the part. It was like, “Well, what if he's really angry, but he hides it?” And it's like, “Well, who's going to say that to him? Oh, let's meet Winona, his ex-wife. And then we came up with that whole scene. I also thought it would be a fun surprise to meet Gary (William Ragsdale), Winona’s new husband. He’s just in the house. And Billy Ragsdale is someone who I had never met, but I wrote an episode of [his Fox sitcom] Herman's Head. So we go way back. And then getting Natalie was a gift.
Earlier, you said Winona’s last line gave you the series.
I would say it did. It was just that idea of — that’s the line that made FX say, “Okay, let’s make the show.” Or at least make the pilot. Then when they saw how Michael shot that scene and all the other scenes in the [pilot], it was like, “Oh, let's go to series.” The problem was, we killed off Boyd.
Boyd was shot by Raylan at Ava’s house, in a callback to how Ava dispatched Boyd’s brother. So how did you decide to change Boyd’s fate? I had read in previous interviews that test screenings had something to do with it.
They did. We went back and added a little scene, when you see Boyd being taken away in the ambulance. By the way, that was [filmed] nowhere near the house we shot in at that time. So the man who never missed, Raylan, well, that also added a connection between these two that’s going to drive the story.
So if Boyd had stayed dead, did you have anyone in mind to be another nemesis or counterpoint for Raylan?
No. It was just going to be story of the week and then build into something. I think we had an idea that there would be something about Winona, but that was a rough idea, because, well, once we figured out that Boyd was going to live — and that was before we went into the writers' room — John Landgraf called and said something like, “So, research and screenings and everything says Walton’s fantastic. We feel — and I think you feel it, too — that the story is not done with [Boyd].” And I said, “Absolutely.”
I remember being in a car and calling Walton. I think he was in a car, too. I told him and asked what he thought and he almost cried. I almost cried. He was like, “I can't tell you how much this call means, because I would love to play that part.” We already knew the series was a go [at that point], but getting [Walton] to come back, that gave us six years.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Justified and Justified: City Primeval are streaming now on Hulu.
