'Justified' Showrunner Explains the Fates that Earned the Show Most Satisfying Series Finale
In a TV season that saw some of our favorite shows come to an end, including Parenthood, Parks and Recreation, Mad Men, and Sons of Anarchy, it’s the deserving Justified that earned the title of Most Satisfying Series Finale in our inaugural reader-voted Yahooies.
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Walton Goggins has already described the significance of the final exchange between his Boyd Crowder and Timothy Olyphant’s Raylan Givens while accepting the award for Most Memorable Line on behalf of the show. Read his words here, and remember that the line, “We dug coal together,” is pulled from both the pilot and the Elmore Leonard short story upon which it was based. You should also know that Leonard’s story, “Fire in the Hole,” ended with Boyd dead, as the pilot was originally supposed to, but that the author so enjoyed Goggins’ performance on the FX drama that he later resurrected the character in his 2012 novel Raylan.
Below, showrunner Graham Yost, who did weekly postmortems with Yahoo TV throughout the FX drama’s final season, takes us inside the writers room one last time to explain how they decided the fates of Raylan, Boyd, and Ava (Joelle Carter) as they built toward that winning finale.
Right from the end of Season 5, we knew our final season would return us to where we began, focused down on Raylan, Boyd and Ava. The big question then was which of them, if any, would get out of Harlan alive. There were various times in the writers room when they each had a day marked for death. In the end we came back to the question that had guided us from the beginning: what would Elmore do? Would he kill Raylan? Nah. His heroes always end up among the living. Ava? Nope — his women are usually still breathing at the end, sometimes in the wind with the money, too. So, then Boyd. Would Elmore have had him bite it? Well, as his researcher and dear friend for 30 years Gregg Sutter put it, “Elmore already tried that and it didn’t stick.” Besides, if Raylan killed Boyd, what would that say about our hero of six years? So that was the call — they would all live. We like to think Elmore would’ve gotten a kick out of that. And we are all so very grateful that you fans got a kick out of it, too.
Take it easy,
Graham Yost
