EP Graham Yost talks the season 3 premiere

Image Credit: Prashant Gupta/FX

SPOILER ALERT! The season premiere of Justified brought us a new villain (Neal McDonough’s Taxi Driver-loving Quarles), a gunfighter almost as cool as Timothy Olyphant’s Raylan (Desmond Harrington’s Fletcher “the Ice Pick” Nix), and the beginning of a beautiful new friendship (Jeremy Davies’ Dickie Bennett and Damon Herriman’s Dewey Crowe). As we’ll be doing each week throughout the season, we asked EP Graham Yost, who wrote the episode with fellow EP/writer Fred Golan, to take us inside the writers room.


ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Let’s start with the scene between Winona and Art at the hospital. Does that mean they’re cool, and we won’t be hearing more about the money she stole from the evidence locker then returned last season?

GRAHAM YOST: You know what, I can’t tell you. But pay attention to that scene. That will have some impact in the sixth episode, and you will understand a little bit of what was going on between Art and Winona and the fact that Winona was pulled over by a Kentucky State Trooper. It’s there for a reason. The first time we saw the episode, it began at the shooting range. Then we realized storywise that we wanted to have had Winona visit him in the hospital, and we decided let’s shoot it. So our initial idea was starting the season over black with gunshots being fired, and then you come up and find Raylan in the range. We wanted to play with the reality of a guy being shot, that you don’t just jump back into the line of duty.

Timothy Olyphant told me that won’t be an issue for long though because, “I have to continue to live.”

We felt that one episode was enough. We’ve shown Raylan be fallible in the past. Back in the first season, he thinks Ava was the target of an assassin when it was really him, and that kind of thing. We like the idea that Raylan is not perfect.

Tim said he thought the network was a little nervous this time to have Raylan missing things.

It’s interesting, they had a question later on in the episode. He has the scene in the elevator with Nix and doesn’t know who he is because he didn’t pay attention to his file earlier. And then he’s sitting down with the team in the conference room and Raylan says to Tim, “This is Fletcher Nix?” And Tim says, “Didn’t you look at his file?” “Not closely.” We sense that he’s kinda screwed up. He should’ve paid attention, even though it wasn’t his case and he didn’t get into the case until after he’d been shown the file, but it’s a bit of a screw up. The network wasn’t sure if that was clear enough, and they wanted Raylan to call Art’s attention to it. They didn’t want him just to sit on it. So weeks after we’d finished the episode, we went back and added the next part, which is Raylan following Art into his office. And then we also thought, well, maybe Raylan should have been a little bit more cognizant of the fact that this pretty girl coming up and telling him all this information was maybe working him, and so we wanted him to recognize that as well.