Forget the multiple deaths in the first 20 minutes of Justified, FX’s new drama starring Timothy Olyphant (pictured) as a U.S. Marshall: The real terror for Olyphant’s Raylan Givens is the reality of going back home.

Reassigned from a cushy post in Miami to the Kentucky office in Harlan County, Raylan finds himself smack in the middle of the blue-collar world of moonshine and coal mining that he thought he’d left behind. His ex wife (Natalie Zea) is working in the courthouse as a court reporter; the recently widowed Ava (Joelle Carter) is doing her best to seduce him. But Raylan has to stay away, since Ava is recently widowed thanks to her killer aim with her abusive husband’s shotgun.

The first episode, which premiered on FX this past Tuesday, is a moody and atmospheric slice of small town life, albeit a small town that seems overrun with white supremacists who get off on blowing up buildings with rocket launchers. Olyphant’s Raylan is just this shy of grizzled, stalking through scenes in boots with cowboy hat titled just so, staring unblinkingly down the wrong end of a variety of firearms.

On the surface, Justified looks and feels like a down home procedural, but there are hints of something deeper at work. The man Raylan killed in Miami, resulting in his reassignment, drew his gun first, Raylan keeps telling people; “I was justified.” But by the end of the first episode, Raylan begins to question if he would have shot him even if he hadn’t pulled his gun first. “You’re the angriest person I know,” his ex wife tells him, and despite Olyphant’s look of surprise (or perhaps because of it), we believe her. Justified might just have its cake and eat it, too, as a shoot ’em up that also refuses to flinch in the question of why we like watching shoot ’em ups.

Photo: FX/Sony