I want to live in the backwoods in my next life. Sure, there's the abject poverty, the pervasive corruption, the outright lawlessness, and highly elusive rats, but there's no more well spoken people in the world. Even the eleven year old child who probably hasn't seen the inside of a school in a long time is articulate and well-mannered. No slang or stutters, just an enviable confident command of the language.
Besides, this was a great start at setting up the story of the season. This show is about calm words followed by loud explosions, and the villain Mags Bennett got the first part right. You can't ham it up in that role and still make it work, and it seems like they've got the right person for it. Plus, Jeremy Davies as one of her sons (oddly limping) is my new favorite post-Lost alumni casting (replacing those episodes of Psych with random Nestor Carbonell.)
The unexpected resolution to last year's cliff hanger was good, the scene at the gas station to end it was the usual well done, and the hint at Boyd's whereabouts (live stick of dynamite has a live stick of dynamite) was interesting. FX has a lot of quality original programming - I started watching Archer! it's what I liked about Adult Swim when I was still watching Adult Swim! - but it's pretty tough to beat this. And with only 13 episodes, it's easy to jump on board.
I love Justified, even though I missed most of the first season. There's basically nothing so stupid that it doesn't sound cool when Timothy Olyphant says it. It was a gutsy move to kill off Bo at the end of last season, but it did wrap things up nicely if they didn't come back for a second season. Mags is a good replacement, and I like that everbody knows Raylan. The thing I'm most interested in, though, is Boyd's character arc for the season. I mean, where does he go from here?
Had this been three or four seasons ago, this would have been about Peter winning the lottery and doing over-the-top stupid stuff with it and having THAT be his downfall.