Fox’s FX channel has a history of pushing the boundaries of “free cable” programming, with shows such as Nip/Tuck, The Shield, Rescue Me, Dirt, Damages, Sons of Anarchy, The League, and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. But although “edgy” material dominates FX’s original programming, the values and ideas of the shows are often rather laudable. It’s a technique many TV producers have adopted from 1970s genre films and perfected in recent years: adding titillating content to very traditional genre material that often reinforces values usually thought of as conservative. The latest example of this approach by FX is the new series Justified. Produced by Graham Yost (Speed, Boomtown, The Pacific) and based on a novel by Western and crime novel master Elmore Leonard (“Three-Ten to Yuma,” Mr. Majestyk, Get Shorty, Out of Sight), Justified stars Timothy Olyphant (Deadwood) as a U.S. Marshall, Raylan Givens, exiled to his hometown area in Eastern Kentucky after his questionable killing of a mobster in Miami. Givens is a straightforward hero without any phony psychological complexity, which in contemporary crime dramas generally serves to undermine the heroic nature of such characters and suggest that heroism is passé, no longer possible in a world in which moral relativism is not

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