Olyphant is ‘Justified’ hit playing US marshal

March 23, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

NEW YORK

Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens has a great walk. A moseying, unconcerned kind of walk that signals his style of dealing with the world.

He’s supercool under pressure. Even staring down the barrel of a bad guy’s gun, Givens tosses the dilemma back on the other man, as if to say: Stop your foolishness before you make your problems worse.

Such is the surface ease and, yes, inner turmoil of Givens, hero of the new FX drama “Justified.” It airs its second episode tonight at 10 after starting with a bang last week by attracting more than 4 million viewers.

It stars Timothy Olyphant as a child of Eastern Kentucky coal country who bolted from that unforgiving way of life for the wide, open spaces of the federal marshal service.

But as “Justified” began, a fatal shooting by Givens may not have been quite justified. As punishment, he was reassigned from sunny Miami to the Lexington, Ky., office.

Now he’s back home where bad guys, old habits and ghosts are right where he left them, along with his ex-wife and long-estranged father, who happens to be a career criminal.

“Raylan told himself he was never going back,” says Olyphant. “Then he gets back, and there’s a lot waiting for him.”

The show is colorful and quirky, befitting its roots in the fiction of crime novelist Elmore Leonard.

“When I’m reading him,” says Olyphant, “I always think he had a twinkle in his eye as he was sitting at the typewriter.”

But on “Justified,” something darker is also in the air, which poses the challenge of balancing lightheartedness with heavier drama.