For a guy who’s supposedly changed, you sound a lot like you always did.” -Dewey
One of the inherent advantages that a TV drama supposedly has over a movie is that characters can grow and change far more over many seasons than they can over the course of a two hour film. But what often fascinates me are the TV shows that choose, for one reason or another, to not let their characters change much, if at all. Sometimes it’s about preserving the status quo (“Dexter” for many years), sometimes about the show espousing a belief that people – real or fictional – aren’t capable of great change (“The Sopranos”), sometimes a combination of the two (the middle seasons of “House”).
With “Justified,” Raylan mainly is who he is. He might be capable of incremental change – being a mite slower to draw his gun just to avoid the paperwork, occasionally telling Winona how his day was – but he is who he is and his code is his code.
Boyd Crowder, on the other hand? He seems to change by the minute. But the key part of that sentence is “seems to.” As Raylan told us in the series pilot, Boyd has a history of trying on new identities as part of his usual pursuit of thrills. And because of that, there’s always this doubt – certainly for the other characters on the show, and to a lesser extent for those of us at home who get to see Boyd in his most private moments when he has no reason to role-play – of just how sincere his latest change is. Continue Reading →