Last night, Season 3 of “Justified” kicked off on FX, and I’m a massive fan of the show, which is probably my current favorite on television and the only program that I absolutely have to catch during its scheduled airtime. One must accept absolutely no time delay for Timothy Olyphant’s swagger topped by a cowboy hat. Olyphant, of course, plays Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, who is a creation of writer Elmore Leonard and originally appeared in two novels, Pronto and Riding the Rap, as well as a short story called “Fire in the Hole.” Leonard, in turn, has taken the character back in a sense for his new book, simply titled Raylan, which also came out yesterday as well and downloaded swiftly to my Kindle where it currently lingers and begs for attention on another day.

Let’s get back to the actual television show though (SPOILER ALERT), which kicked off in grand fashion with an episode called “The Gunfighter” and a bit of a hitch to Raylan’s swagger as he recovered from being shot in the Season 2 finale (which I reviewed over at Pajiba). The story picks up right where it left off, and Chief Deputy Art Mullen (Nick Searcy) shows Raylan no mercy. Meanwhile, Raylan’s ex-wife and current girlfriend Winona (Natalie Zea) is pregnant, and they’re tossing around baby names while Raylan has a few encounters with a Dixie Mafia hitman that, uh, really likes pizza and is “too pretty to wear a mask.” Early on, Raylan works in a good tussle with Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins), who always gets the great lines like “Raylan, if a book could only be judged by its cover, then you’d be a best seller.” Indeed, the relationship between Raylan and Boyd is a bromance for the ages.

Oh, and have I mentioned yet that Neal McDonough guest stars this season as a villan? Neal’s opening scenes were fairly promising, and he’ll probably be quite the menace as the season progresses. Olyphant sat down to talk with NY Mag about McDonough as well as more about this upcoming season of the show:

On Being Both Star & Producer: “What a producer does is one of the great mysteries of life. I don’t know what template I’m following, but I’ve basically got the green light to completely overstep in every department. You name it, I’m in there meddling, poking my nose in there – from the writers to the designers to the special effects to the stunts. It’s too much fun! I’ll be stumbling around the art department going, ‘What can you make in here? What are you capable of?’ It’s sort of a never-ending playground. I don’t quite understand it all, and sometimes I have no clue what they’re all doing, but it’s fascinating to watch the story come together. It’s a fun math problem every time.”

On Stealing From Leonard’s Raylan: “We steal a lot from that. I’m a big fan of his stories, so I read them at every turn I get as it is. But that book, we stole a lot of it for season two. We just stripped it apart last year. We were sort of privy to the book as it was being written in its various stages, so last season, we read some of what he was writing, and many of the characters are in large part from the book. We did our own thing with it – in the book, it was a patriarch instead of a matriarch – but he had the sons, the storefront, the marijuana, and Loretta McCready hanging out, as well as the coal mining representative coming to Harlan, the town meeting, and Raylan as security detail. That’s all in the book, and he encouraged us to steal from it.”

On Leonard Stealing Right Back: “We had the original stories, Graham [Yost, the showrunner] took those and added some of his own characters, and Elmore, God bless him, then wrote about some of the characters that were created for the show. For instance, Rachel is a character Graham created for the show, and Elmore took her and put her in the Raylan book, and then he took the liberty of telling us things about her that we didn’t know – like where she’s from and how she paid her way through college. So we took it right back, and put it in episode four of this new season. It just tickles me that we’re riffing off each other like that. I’m not sure there’s anything like that anywhere else! Instead of just having Raylan from the books versus Raylan the TV character, now it’s sort of blurring into something new, a new universe. Maybe it’ll be like James Bond – and it’s just a question of, twenty years from now, which other dude gets to wear the hat?”

On Neal McDonough as a mobster: “[The Oxycontin turf war] seems to be an easy way to capitalize on the hardships of the people in Harlan. What’s cool is that there are all these new people around who are capitalizing on the absence of Mags Bennett, because all the bad guys want a piece of the pie. And they can’t all have it. ”

On Winona’s Pregnancy: “It makes everything harder. It’s harder to break up with someone, harder to maintain a relationship, harder to do dangerous work. That’s the whole trick: How do you keep all these balls in the air? That’s what I keep telling my kids Life was easy until they came along! Nah, that’s not fair to tell them that. But that also works to get them to brush their teeth. I’d rather Raylan get a golden retriever. One step at a time! I think a dog would be good for him, some kind of therapy, outside of hunting people down.”

[From NY Mag]

It sounds like Olyphant isn’t crazy about the Winona pregnancy storyline at all, right? Well, I can’t blame him since I’m firmly Team Ava (Joelle Carter) and feel like Winona is only using her knocked-up status to try and change Raylan. He’s a lawman through to the core, and Winona should know by now (after being married to the guy and then divorcing him) that she can’t change any man, let alone this one. Still, this season premiere gave us a chance to see a bit of fellow Marshal action when Tim (Jacob Pitts) pulled out his sniper gear and Rachel (Erica Tazel) went in for an effective tackle. Later this season, Carla Gugino (who plays a complicated character that Olyphant can’t discuss for legal reasons) will pop in as a guest star, and I suspect that she’ll also portray a potential love interest and temptation for Raylan. Hopefully, we’ll see the magnificent return of the irresistably stupid Dewey Crowe too, since there was a quick peek at him towards the end of this episode.

Fire in the hole!

“Justified” production stills courtesy of FX and WENN