‘Justified’ ushers in end to long, hard times

Heads up, you hillbilly hayseeds!

I’m-a give you 10 seconds to put down that Oxy and consider your situation: Them long, hard times to come have finally arrived. “Justified,” the best, funniest, most murderously violent backwoods crime drama-soap opera of all time, began its sixth and final season on FX on Tuesday night.

I know. I know.

You’re down to soppin’ gravy from your Limehouse pork plate. You’re plumb out of Mags Bennett’s “apple pie.” But there’s no way to sugarcoat the withdrawal symptoms that await, 13 episodes down the road. Things ain’t never been easy in the hollers of Harlan County, Ky., and … what? Look, you keep talking? I’m-a put you in the trunk.

For the uninitiated: Raylan Givens is our deputy U.S. marshal hero in a hat. He’d been posted in Miami but got busted back to his native southeastern Kentucky for shooting too many people. Last we saw, he was back in God-forsaken Harlan County and had persuaded his former girlfriend, Ava, to be a confidential informant against her current yet estranged fiancé, Boyd, the spiky-haired local crime boss. Back in the day, Boyd and Raylan had grown up and dug coal together, then fell in love with the same blonde.

Any fool knows this ain’t gonna end well.

In this last season, we can be sure that the bourbon will flow and the bullets will fly — the “Justified” body count has been as Shakespearean as the treachery — but not of which bodies and whose bullets.

So begins the stretch run of one of the best television shows ever made about the South. “Justified” gets so many things right about the region, in an outsize but offhand way: The generations of rural poverty, the struggles between fathers and sons, the wit, the love of the spoken language, the unwritten racial mores, bourbon, manners, seething class resentment, the underbelly of violence beneath the facade of church and religion and, most poignantly, the desperation Raylan feels to escape all this.

Truman Capote famously observed that all Southerners come home, even if it’s in a box. That is the cut-the-meat-off-the-bones issue of the final season: Will Raylan wind up beneath that tombstone with his name on it in the front yard of his daddy’s house?

Season 6 also will be the last cinematic work in which legendary crime writer Elmore Leonard, who died in 2013, had an active role. His 2004 short story, “Fire in the Hole,” was the basis for the series. He was an executive producer and was such an influence that executive producer Graham Yost had his writers read Leonard’s novels for homework.

“Those guys, they went to Elmore Leonard U.,” says Gregg Sutter, Leonard’s longtime researcher.

Yost says that when writing the pilot episode, he would type in Leonard’s original dialogue to get the rhythm.

“There was no Ur text, there was no Bible, but there were the 44 novels” of Leonard’s, he says in a phone interview.

How complicated has it gotten over 65 episodes?

Let’s knock back a shot of Elmer T. Lee, Boyd’s bourbon of choice, and run a background check on the trio who will carry us to the county line. All three have been shot, and they’ve beaten up and gunned down multiple halfwits, all of whom had it coming.

• Raylan. Deputy U.S. marshal. Shot once, suspended twice. Frances, his mom, died young. Arlo, his no-account dad, was shot (once by Raylan) but died via a prison shiv job. Helen, his aunt and stepmom, was shot to death. His boss, Art, has been shot. His ex-wife, Winona, remarried — badly — and that guy was shot. Winona hooked up with Raylan again for a spell, got preggers and moved to Florida with the baby, all but forcing Raylan to have a series of dead-end affairs with hot blondes.

• Boyd. Drug dealer, bar owner, explosives expert, former white supremacist, former pastor of a born-again church. Shot twice (once by Raylan), beaten up by thugs even worse than he is. Loquacious. Mom died long ago. Bo, his dad, was shot by Miami-based gangsters seconds before Boyd was going to do it hisself. His baby brother, Bowman, was shot dead at the dinner table by Ava, who then dated Raylan and then got engaged to Boyd. Executed his kin, cousin Johnny the backstabber.

• Ava. Former beauty shop worker. Femme fatale turned madam. Shot once. Knocked around in prison. Weak chin but a nice smile. Has killed by shotgun and shiv. Now working for the feds.

Meanwhile, the once-mighty Bennett family has been wiped from the face of the Earth, save Dickie, who’s in prison. The Crowes are decimated. Boyd is the last of the Crowders. Raylan is the last of the Givens.

And yet, you know the dead shall multiply this year, not least because of the haunting Darrell Scott song that plays at the end of each season:

“In the deep dark hills of eastern Kentucky

“That’s the place where I trace my bloodline

“And it’s there I read on a hillside gravestone

“You will never leave Harlan alive”

This is the sort of bone-deep, poetically-if-not-literally true vibe upon which “Justified” trades. Coal, by tradition, has been a terrible way to make a living, and the black rock is the show’s poverty-scorched heart.

The real Harlan County lies along the Virginia border and is one of the poorest places in America. It’s 29,000 or so people are spread over 465 square miles. The median income is about $26,000 per household. It’s 96 percent white. It’s been home to some of the nation’s most vicious union violence, depicted in “Harlan County U.S.A.” Full of hills and hollers and … it has virtually never been seen in the show.

The series is filmed almost entirely in and just outside of Santa Clarita, Calif., about an hour north of Los Angeles.

Just about the only actual bit of the Bluegrass State is in the show’s opening credits. The dilapidated houses, the little brick churches and such, were filmed around Cumberland, says Jason Edwards, a former reporter at the Harlan Daily Enterprise, who often helps the show with research. The only image of Harlan, the city, is that little town down in the valley.

So, look, knock back that shot of Elmer T. It’s our last days in Harlan. Remember, the coal train runs at 5:30, the 21-foot rule is a myth, never underestimate Constable Bob … and stay frosty, y’all.