Jonathan Storm: This marshal prowls Ky. hollers

Timothy Olyphant and Walton Goggins just sitting there at the kitchen table would make a pretty good TV show. Olyphant, a former star of Deadwood and guest star of Damages, and Goggins, who turned in such a superb supporting job with Michael Chiklis on The Shield, are about as riveting as men get on TV.

And their characters do wind up at the kitchen table in the pilot of Justified, as good as a good-guy, bad-guy show can get, tonight at 10 on FX. They're both armed, facing that classic conundrum of being in a town that's not big enough for the both of them.

Goggins, a part-time player who won't appear in every episode of Justified, is a backwoods hoodlum who leads a group of genetically defective moronic neo-Nazis in criminal escapades for fun and profit.

Olyphant plays Raylan Givens, a contemporary U.S. marshal, who can wear an off-white cowboy hat with the best of 'em and could outgun Wyatt Earp, Sam Sixkiller and Quick Draw McGraw all at once. Givens doesn't draw his gun. He pulls it. And, being the good guy, he never pulls it first. He doesn't have to.

"You pull on me," he tells Goggins' Boyd Crowder, "I'll put you down."

At the top of the show, Raylan demonstrates his skills, goading a Latin gun thug to put down his fork and make his move over a fine lunch by the pool of a swank Miami hostelry. The dessert course never comes, but the coroner's truck does. Givens subsequently argues that the shooting was justified. They all are, as is he in his single-minded effort to make the world right and give his show a name.

But, alas, as the exasperated bosses of so many trigger-happy heroes have demonstrated down the years, such arguments usually fall on deaf ears, and Givens finds himself trading la vida loca in Miami for low life in the hills and hollers of his native eastern Kentucky.

The men there are stupid, poor, and slack-jawed, the women are conniving, poor, and slatternly, and backwoods-style picking with just the slightest rinky-dink tone permeates the soundtrack.

"I had to scrub the wall with Lysol, you know, to get the stain off of it," one of Givens' old flames tells him. The stain was part brains and part blood after she blew her husband to smithereens with one of the family shotguns. "Lysol's the best cleaning product you can buy."

I guarantee you that newspapers from Paducah to Pikeville are up in arms over the unflattering presentation of denizens of the Bluegrass State. Good. It's about time some place other than New Jersey got the insulting TV treatment.

Givens is the creation of the entertaining Elmore Leonard, who always mixes humor - usually more along the lines of wry smiles than outright guffaws - with his mayhem.

"It was at least 20 years ago," the prolific writer of westerns and crime novels told TV critics at their winter meeting in Pasadena, Calif., that he met a man in Amarillo, Texas, who introduced himself as Raylan Givens. "I said, 'Raylan Givens, you're going to be in a book, probably more than one.' "

It has been two: Pronto and Riding the Rap, but it was a short story, "Fire in the Hole," that formed the basis for tonight's first episode. Leonard himself has little to do with the TV show, but he seemed happy that executive producer Graham Yost (who wrote the blockbuster feature Speed and the underappreciated TV show Boomtown) and his band of writers have stayed true to his original.

Givens works out of the Lexington, Ky., branch of the U.S. Marshals Service. His boss is a plainspoken guy, and his associates include a no-nonsense African American woman and a sniper who can hit a spot two hairs past a freckle from 300 yards, but who carries around a big bag of issues from his tours of duty in Afghanistan.

They'll have a new case every week, set amidst the ongoing story of Givens' previous life in the backwoods, most especially with his father, a local big-shot criminal, which means his potatoes are one step up from the smallest size. His name is Arlo Givens.

Raylan eventually misses the bull's-eye in one of his gunslinging encounters, but Leonard never does when he's shooting for a colorful name. And Justified itself stays on target all the time, too, an instant entrant in the best-new-show sweepstakes in a TV season that already has several solid candidates.

Television

Justified

10 tonight on FX