Over six seasons, deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens made a lot of enemies. Some of them popped up for a single episode of Justified and were scattered to the wind. Others stuck around and wove themselves into the fabric of the show.
With Timothy Olyphant set to make his return in Justified: City Primeval, it’s as good a time as any to reflect on that lineup of villains who operated beneath Givens’ standard of the law and, for the most part, wound up shot. Justified evolved from a potential weekly procedural into an overarching story that took years to tell. And on the way, no shortage of brutes and scofflaws — both complex and one-dimensional — vied to control the criminal element of Harlan County, Kentucky.
So let’s talk about the bad guys.
This is an effort to rank the most memorable villains across six seasons of Justified. In order to qualify for the list, antagonists had to be both a threat to Givens and have an arc that spanned multiple episodes. Sorry, fedora/ice-pick guy, you’re out.
Characters are ranked by their overall threat to Givens with a large emphasis on how compelling they were to watch each Wednesday night. Nicky Augustine may have had access to Givens’ family, for example, but I doubt anyone was that consumed by a former Nickelodeon host as a crime lord.
Keep in mind the baseline here is pretty high. Almost everyone made for a great multiple-episode foil to Raylan Givens.
Except for Michael Rapaport, the world’s least convincing Floridian.