The Peter Principle holds that people are promoted beyond their means: they do so well at one level that it is assumed they will thrive at the next one up, and this process continues until they reach a point where their abilities are over-taxed, at which point their career stagnates, unable to progress and clearly ill-suited at their current position.
You could do little better by way of an illustration than to look at the work of Timothy Olyphant.
His breakthrough role was as Sheriff Seth Bullock in the brilliant Wild West period piece ‘Deadwood’. However, his riveting performance as the Manichean, hair-trigger-temper Bullock led, somehow, to the chief villain slot in the fourth ‘Die Hard’. The same year saw him take the lead in the instantly forgettable ‘Hitman’ videogame adaptation.
This was a one-two punch of tawdry mediocrity. However, bucking the Peter Principle, Olyphant seems to have slipped back down to his comfort zone by returning to the world of serial TV drama, as Manichean, hair-trigger-temper Deputy Marshall Raylan Givens in ‘Justified’ (various timeslots, Five USA).
He even gets to wear a cowboy hat again.
The fingerprints of series producer Elmore Leonard are all over the opening episode of this show: Givens starts as a Marshall in Miami, an incongruous figure in a white Stetson giving a drug cartel trigger-man 24 hours to leave town. The gun-man not only outstays his time, but pulls a piece on Givens and gets gunned down for his troubles.
“He drew first” doesn’t go down to well as a legal argument (though Givens maintains that he was “Justified”) and he gets packed off to rural Kentucky until the heat dies down.
However, Kentucky is where Givens grew up, and he left plenty of baggage to collect on his return; an ex-wife, a mysterious criminal father and an old friend turned white supremacist terrorist.
Leonard’s ability to draw memorable characters and then entwine them in labyrinthine plots and complex relationships (see ‘Get Shorty’, ‘Out of Sight’ and ‘Jackie Brown’), makes it surprising that he’s never really made his mark on TV before.
‘Justified’ gets off to a nicely slow-burning start – it’s a straight-forward police procedural on the surface but there’s every sign of threads being laid down that will run through the series as a whole.
Then there is Olyphant. Givens is about 90% Bullock, but there’s a touch more wit and a different emphasis to the character. In ‘Deadwood’ the focus was on the corruption of a rigidly moralistic figure in a lawless environment of pure pragmatism. ‘Justified’ is a less ambitious show, happy to roll along as character-driven episodic drama.
“Give it time” is written all over this show.
It’s certainly not must-see drama on a first viewing, but the Elmore Leonard name earns it some respect as does the return of Olyphant to an acting role with which he is obviously comfortable and for which he is perfectly qualified.
