Fargo and True Detective fit perfectly within the modest constraints of their limited-series form: small towns provide—and limited series require—just enough life to flesh out a narrative without the risk of overabundance, randomness, and arbitrariness. Both shows reject Jameson’s “thickening continuum” for an all-encompassing sense of isolation and dislocation that’s reinforced by their mutual rejection of pop cultural signifiers and modern technology. Fargo’s disgraced FBI agents Pepper and Budge work in an old-school, analog file room; the paper “files” that True Detective’s Hart and Cohle seek were lost in hurricane flooding. Fargo’s Gus Grimly communicates with his daughter on a walkie-talkie. The “murder board” at the Bemidji police station is a cat’s cradle of red yarn and local vernacular (one out-of-town hitman is listed as the “deaf fella”). And on and on.
This sense of small-town timelessness is hardly new to television. Indeed, one could argue that it’s inscribed in television’s DNA. Twenty-five years before Frederic Jameson wrote about the flattening effect of our nostalgia for small towns, the Andy Griffith Show provided its audience with a weekly window onto a wholesome “time gone by”— Mayberry, North Carolina, patterned after Griffith’s actual hometown of Mt. Airy (pop. 7,000 in 1960). Though it was technically contemporary in its setting, Griffith was always frank about the show’s conscious attempt to re-create the “feeling of the 1930s.” It is the testament to the power of nostalgia that The Andy Griffith Show has been on the air in one form or another pretty much continuously since it debuted on CBS in 1961. Audiences today are drawn to the comforts of the “simpler time” of the early-1960s run; its audience in the 1960s sought the illusory comforts of the 1930s. It’s nostalgia as Matryoshka doll.
It did not take long for networks to realize that television was uniquely suited to this brand of escapism. By 1971, CBS was airing seven rural-themed shows and network television was so full of rural stereotypes that Gil Scott Heron sought to burn it all down in his seminal spoken-word piece “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” (“Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville Junction will no longer be so Goddamn relevant”). But 1971 proved to be a saturation point rather than a high-water mark. In an attempt to appeal to a younger, more contemporary demographic, CBS initiated what later became known as “the rural purge,” cancelling its entire line-up of rural shows, including Mayberry RFC (what was left of the Andy Griffith Show once Griffith left), Green Acres, and (the year before) Petticoat Junction. As one actor put it, 1971 “was the year CBS killed everything with a tree in it.”
Not for long, however. In response to a popular uproar, CBS premiered The Waltons a year later, a wholesome recounting of a wholesome family’s travails in hardscrabble 1930s rural Virginia. Although expectations were low, The Waltons found a large audience, running for nine seasons and peaking at Number 2 in the Nielsen ratings in 1973-74. Not long after, NBC would attempt to capture a similar tone with Little House on the Prairie. The Waltons ended in 1981 and Little House on the Prairie in 1982, victims of shifting cultural currents. The early 1980s brought an emphatic backlash against 1970s culture that manifested itself in myriad ways: the rise of New Wave aesthetics, MTV, and a love-hate relationship with the interrelated preppy and Yuppie cultures. Ever adaptable, television soon incorporated these changes, replacing overt nostalgia with culture-clash comedy. The often-underrated Newhart debuted in 1982, updating Green Acres’ fish-out-of-water humor to contemporary cultural and generational divides embodied by its relocated Boomer city-dwellers, materialistic Yuppies, and seemingly clueless country bumpkins.
The Newhart template would prove both durable and malleable. Two months after CBS brought Newhart to a close (in classic fashion) in 1990, it debuted Northern Exposure, which followed a young Jewish physician’s nonconsensual relocation from NYC to the small Alaskan town of Cicely. Although it was created by the team behind the much-admired St. Elsewhere, Northern Exposure premiered to little fanfare—especially compared to Twin Peaks, which debuted just two months before and almost immediately became a cultural flashpoint. There are broad thematic parallels between the two shows—in each, an outsider arrives in a remote northwestern town with an eccentric population; surreality ensues—but even sharper divides. If Twin Peaks is best read as a deconstruction and corruption of small town nostalgia, Northern Exposure is clearly on the side of the town, practically begging its would-be hero to loosen up and let his freak flag fly.
Five years later, NBC inverted the Northern Exposure formula with Ed, the story of a former New York corporate lawyer who returns in disgrace to his hometown of Stuckeyville, Ohio. Unlike Fleischman, Ed’s gratingly-enthusiastic titular protagonist throws himself into the town’s affairs, buying the local bowling alley and opening up a new law practice inside (Ohio bar admission be damned). Ed falls back in with his high school friends and aggressively pursues his high school crush, season-after-season—in spite of her resistance, the show never hints that Ed’s behavior might be inappropriate. If anything, it posits that Carol’s resistance to his charms as a violation of television’s narrative contract and, as punishment, burdens her with a series of terrible boyfriends. One (John Slattery) was so despised by the show’s audience that fans devoted a website to ways they might kill him off.
Ed frames its hero’s return as redemptive and the audience is expected to follow suit. In an about-face from his Big Law past, he recasts himself as an advocate for community values, throwing himself into low-stakes, high-principle, long-shot cases. Through his clients—aging pastors, doddering party magicians, good Samaritans, an army of sad sacks—and his causes, like turning his bowling alley into a historical landmark, Ed puts a wholesome spin on Gen X stereotypes while simultaneously (or seemingly) rejecting neoliberal materialism. Happily, Ed, the show, is—at least sometimes—in on the joke. When Stuckeyville High creates a student-run television, station, the pitch of one of the students, a Stuckey Bowl regular, is laughably familiar: “Americans these days are looking to television for something comforting, something warm, gentle and reassuring.” That air of nostalgia nonetheless finds room for self-consciousness. The show name-drops Northern Exposure, nods to David E. Kelley’s Picket Fences, and references a variety of classic 1970s television shows like Archie Bunker, Happy Days, M.A.S.H., One Day at a Time, and The Rockford Files.
Jameson would, no doubt, identify this as an unfortunate surrender to “identical products and standardized spaces.” But Ed suggests something different. These references are treated like a common language, a shared cultural heritage among the latch-key kids of the 1980s that links the characters to each other and the audience. But Ed, the show, also subverts the nostalgia of Ed, the character, by questioning whether he seeks to preserve Stuckeyville as it is or bully it into becoming the television-like idyll it never was. It is true that a large crowd shows up to see the cast of Happy Days at a promotion aimed at saving Stuckey Bowl, but those who attend are far more interested in getting a glimpse of faded television stars than they are in saving the bowling alley.
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That I can weave all of these shows together as strands in a single, interlocking thread, is strong evidence that Hollywood’s treatment of small towns has always played to comfortable (and comforting) tropes. It makes one appreciate all the more those shows that try to capture the complexities of contemporary life, wherever it takes root. On one level, FX’s Justified—which follows trigger-happy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens after he’s banished from Miami to his backwater birthplace in Harlan County, Kentucky—is a prototypical genre exercise, updating the ethos of paperback Western to modern Appalachia. On another, however, it is deeply fascinated with both its setting and those who live there, taking a methodical approach in establishing the complex socioeconomic and regional hierarchies, sub-strata, and microhabitats that have formed over generations. Its six seasons play out against a backdrop of failed farms and a dying mining industry that’s only become more dangerous and destructive as influence and affluence have waned. The citizens of Harlan County view outsiders—whether they be individuals, corporations, or the federal government—with a well-earned wariness.
It helps to have a solid foundation to work from. In this case, it’s clear that the show’s creators and writers learned something fundamental from Elmore Leonard, who wrote the novels and short-stories on which Justified is based. Family loyalties and feuds, collective memory, communal self-construction through myth and lore—there is a local logic at the core of the Justified universe. If it’s easy to hear Darrell Scott’s now-famous “You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive” as a dead-end lament for those born to die in Kentucky’s backwoods—which, to be clear, it is—a closer look at its lyrics extends that same fate to those who go into Harlan, pursuing self-interest at local expense.
This dynamic is clearest in Justified’s second and fourth seasons—also the show’s strongest—in which Big Coal and the Detroit mafia find Harlan County frustratingly inhospitable. Their mistake is twin-fold. They underestimate the intelligence of Harlan County’s residents and the importance of localized knowledge. In Season 2, something as simple as the navigability of local roads provides criminal matriarch Mags Bennett (and, to her dismay, the Bennett’s enemy, Boyd Crowder) with an opportunity to extort an out-of-state mining company, seeking to expand mountain top removal to Harlan. That her soon-to-be-vanquished adversary in negotiations is a Columbia-educated executive is no coincidence. In Season 4, similar knowledge is the key to secreting a fugitive out of town—on a coal train, naturally. As Raylan tells one Detroit button man, shocked that the unassuming and unimposing local constable killed one of his men, “people underestimate Bob at their peril.” The same can be said of Harlan.
The audience, having seen Bob withstand a savage beating before turning the tables on his would-be killer, knows that the key to his survival was not his capacity for violence but, instead, a tolerance for pain. That toughness, born of place, proves to be a tie that binds even enemies. Justified is full of unlikely alliances formed to defend Harlan against would-be interlopers, transforming local enemies into counter-insurgent allies. Such kinship is hard-won, but powerful. The series finale closes with Givens, now stationed in Miami, visiting his nemesis Crowder in jail, to inform him of the (apparent) death of Boyd’s’ wife and Raylan’s ex-girlfriend, Ava. When Boyd asks Raylan why he chose to deliver the message in person when he just as easily could have passed it along through the warden, his question answers itself: “we dug coal together.”
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Unlike Fargo, True Detective, and Justified, most (though certainly not all) of the physical violence in Season One of Ray McKinnon’s slow-burning—and ultimately soaring—wrongful conviction drama Rectify is located in the distant past or the uncertain future. Rectify‘s initial season follows the first free week in the adult life of Daniel Holden, convicted at 18 of killing his high school girlfriend but now released back into his hometown of Paulie, Georgia after two decades on death row. The show captures the complicated relationship between past and present through twin narratives, flashing back to Daniel’s last year(s) on death row including his friendship with Kerwin, the inmate in the next cell. The sympathy we feel for Kerwin in spite of his guilt is a testament to the show’’s studied even-handedness.
Daniel is, like True Detective’s Cohle, an autodidact with a philosophical bent. He intellectualizes as a way of measuring and mediating a cruel and arbitrary world—it is a means of understanding, of course, but it’s also how he keeps the world at arm’s-length. Unlike Cohle, however, Daniel refuses to give into nihilism: a “world view” devoid of optimism, he explains, is a “kind of fantasy itself.” In the present day, the show tracks Daniel’s attempt to escape a kind of compulsive hopelessness that was protective on death row but proves destructive outside. Neither Daniel nor the show are able to shake this pessimism easily. Malice and violence lurk under town’s placid façade, hinting at the possibility that—as Daniel’s former defense attorney, Rutherford Gaines (Hal Holbrook) laments from his deathbed—we’re nothing more than “monkeys going to nowhere.” Lorne Malvo would no doubt agree.
Rectify, like Fargo, is concerned with the superficiality of small town pleasantness—where it differs is its generosity. It grants Daniel’s neighbors a voice and viewpoint that Fargo denies, chronicling their struggle to balance anger, gentility-based norms, and Christian forgiveness. If Rectify entertains the possibility that small towns are like prisons, it also makes sure we understand the difference between simile and equivalence. In the very first scene of the very first episode, the camera watches—through a small square window in a dark room—the processing of a newly-arrived prisoner, complete with cavity search. In the background, Daniel watches through another window in a closed door, waiting to be released, suddenly on the other side of the panopticon. When Daniel’s guard turns his back to allow Daniel a moment of privacy while he changes into civilian clothes, we get our first real sense of the seemingly insuperable distance between prisoner and civilian.
Daniel’s release is based on DNA evidence that calls his conviction into question but does not exonerate him of guilt. And, as a result, he cannot completely shake suspicion, including our own—indeed, he does himself few favors. On the day in question, he was high on psychedelics and even he can’t be sure of what happened. Those suspicions turn the town into a makeshift surveillance state: there is nowhere Daniel or his family can go that is not noted, watched, catalogued, and commented upon. (“Remember,” his attorney tells the family, before they’ve even been reunited with him, “everything we do is being watched and judged.”). If freedom seems to the death row prisoner like “a world full of windows,” everything that follows reminds us that windows go both ways. In one excruciatingly tense scene that takes place in the parking lot of a big box store, Daniel is trapped behind the driver’s-side window of his mother’s car, caught in the fixed gaze of the television cameras that crowd around him.
It’s to McKinnon’s great credit that, as claustrophobic and menacing as Paulie seems (as Paulie is), it is far from one-dimensional. The waitress who spreads gossip about Daniel and his family sends Daniel home with fried chicken, without charge. Although Rectify does not romanticize religion, the local evangelical church—the too-easy subject of derision in True Detective, with its freak-show ambience—is treated with expansive even-handedness. When Daniel, desperate to wash the past away, rushes into a baptism that offers fleeting catharsis but not transcendence, his confusion is at once raw and terrifying. If the church’s followers want to believe that miracles are possible “in this town, right now,” Rectify does not begrudge them their optimism. But it does not quite share it.
Elsewhere, the show’s relationship to Christian cosmology is more oblique. Wandering Paulie’s sleepy, late-night streets, Daniel is picked up by a grizzled—and, yes, mysterious—stranger in a battered pick-up truck who asks for help with some errands. To go into too much detail would spoil a delightfully surreal hour of television. At one point, however, as Daniel and his new acquaintance wrestle in a field in the goldenrod light of early morning, the violence and tension are almost unbearable, the possibility that one will kill or be killed by the other, frighteningly real. As with Daniel’s baptism, however, these lofty stakes ultimately yield, opening up something more intimate and personal. For the first time, we get a real sense of the depths of Daniel’s loneliness: the intimacy of violence is better than no intimacy at all.
Back in the everyday world, Paulie remains trapped in a very particular version of the past, one in which the murder of Daniel’s girlfriend was long ago solved and explained, Daniel tried and convicted, and judgment (and justice) fixed. If the town’s desire to leave the past in the past seems unfair to those of us on the outside (Daniel’s public interest lawyer, the audience), Rectify strives to show us that Paulie’s inability to let go is not the product of some particular, local failing—it is, instead, universal.
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In the late 1970s, the area in-and-around Cecil County was the stalking ground of the “Johnston Gang,” an infamous crime family (immortalized in the 1986 Sean Penn film, At Close Range) that made a small fortune by stealing farm equipment before being torn apart by its own ambitions. In a sense, the Johnstons embodied the age-old tradition of hillbilly rebels—in trouble with the law, as a famous theme song once put it, since the day they were born. Good money rarely follows bad, however, and, in a Justified-like turn, the family eventually turned to selling drugs and then, inexorably, to murder. In 1981, Bruce Sr. and his brothers Norman and David were all sentenced to life for the killing six people (including three teenagers), as well as the attempted murder of Bruce, Jr. The story was sensational enough that it was picked up by papers around the country.
The Johnston legend did not end with those convictions, however. In 1999, Norman escaped, breaking out of a maximum security prison in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania in a manner befitting a Hollywood script: he “stuffed a dummy trimmed with human hair into his cell bed, then bust[ing] through window bars and vanish[ing].” Although Huntingdon was nearly 200 miles away from southeastern Pennsylvania/northeastern Maryland, Johnston returned where he was from, where he was able to avoid custody for 19 days. During that time, he was a constant presence in and on the local news, which breathlessly reported would-be sightings—on a porch, in a park, at a fruit stand, along railroad tracks. Some speculated that he’d returned to Cecil County “for revenge or to get money.” City papers found an opportunity to reinforce clichés of small town life:
None of this is comforting to residents of Cecil County, many of whom are used to leaving doors unlocked. Now, many of them report staying home, with their windows locked and front door bolted. Streets that last week were filled with the noise of children on bicycles have fallen silent.
This was more folklore than news. Evidence suggests that, like the curious teens of Rectify who hound Daniel for selfies, those living along the Mason-Dixon line enjoyed their brief flirtation with lawlessness and legend. How else would one explain why copies of At Close Range flew off the shelves of local video stores during Johnston’s time on the run? Buried under the abundant nonsense of those 1999 newspaper articles is a palpable sense of local pride, a shared belief that Johnston’s redneck resilience and knowledge of the land would be enough to evade a massive manhunt:
“He knows the area. … The man was a hunter. The man was a farmer,” said Tim Bickling, who has been following reports about the manhunt. “If he wants to hide, he can hide,” said Bickling, standing outside his white clapboard home in nearby Cherry Hill.
The combination of memory, fear, morbid fascination, and regional pride is a potent one, and the area buzzed with it for the duration of Johnston’s flight. But it was misdirected. Johnston’s capture was both anticlimactic and comic:
But for days on end, he was on the run from state troopers, crouching in the cornfields, his heart pounding with each pass of the state police chopper. He was frustrated by his inability to steal new cars with tricky alarms and to operate self-serve gas pumps. After 20 years in prison, even his old Chester County stomping grounds didn’t seem the same. “He was dazed by all the change,” said his brother, Joe Rivera, who spoke to Johnston once during his time on the run.
Whatever Johnston once knew, it wasn’t enough to make up for all the changes that took place in his decades in prison. New housing developments and factories occupied what were once open fields. Old networks had shriveled up and disappeared. And so, after all of that work to get free, Johnston escaped into a world that was foreign to him. Places change, for better or worse, and we must change with them.