Hulu’s 6-Part Western Series Is One Of Its Best

Although Hulu’s Justified is one of the best Western TV shows of all time, many viewers might not even recognize the show’s true genre. Westerns were a staple of early network television schedules, with shows like Rawhide and Bonanza being some of the medium’s earliest major successes. However, the genre’s small-screen popularity declined in the ‘70s.

Despite some exceptions in the ‘80s and ‘00s, like Dallas and Deadwood, few of TV’s biggest shows in the decades since 1970 have been Westerns. The genre’s cultural position was supplanted by cop shows, with police procedurals becoming the most consistently popular network TV hits. That is, until Westerns like Justified came along.

Justified Is One Of The Best Neo-Western Shows Ever

What makes showrunner Graham Yost’s 2010 FX series Justified so brilliant is the show’s unique take on the Western. Set in the current day and based on legendary crime writer Elmore Leonard’s stories, Justified was a six-season masterpiece that wowed critics throughout its 78 episodes. The series centered on Timothy Olyphant’s tough US Marshall Raylan Givens.

Since each season of this thriller saw the gruff, cynical antihero take on new villains, from meth-cooking criminals to Neo-Nazi gangs, the show might sound more like a conventional cop show than a Western. However, Justified’s best move was turning Givens into the modern equivalent of a Wild West sheriff, bending the rules to establish law and order.

Justified Only Got Better Throughout Its Six Seasons

While every season of Justified was great, the show’s later seasons and its spinoff Justified: City Primeval were particularly strong since they unapologetically played up the show’s Western inspirations. Instead of treating the West as a historic relic, Justified updated its structure and applied the same morally grey attitude toward a more modern story.

This made Justified darker and more unpredictable than a typical cop show, but also headier and harsher than old-fashioned Westerns. Building on Leonard’s masterful prose, the show took the grit and brutality of later Westerns by directors like Sam Peckinpah and fused it with the subversive postmodern cop show format pioneered by The Shield and The Wire.

Justified Started A Major TV Trend

Traditional cop shows typically depicted the police as the good guys and the criminals as straightforward villains, offering viewers the same uncomplicated heroes vs villains narratives that Westerners popularized decades earlier. In contrast, Justified muddied the waters, making its cops corrupt and some of its criminals surprisingly sympathetic.

In doing so, Justified revived the small-screen Western and paved the way for the Yellowstone franchise and Taylor Sheridan’s subsequent reign as one of TV’s biggest creators. Without Hulu’s masterpiece Justified, viewers might never have gotten Dark Winds, Tulsa King, Mayor of Kingstown, Yellowstone, and Landman, among other shows that were influenced by Hulu’s hit.