JUSTIFIED Creator Graham Yost Talks Season 3, Overarching Story Plans

Justified creator and EP Graham Yost discusses the direction of the season, how the criminal element will shape things, and how far ahead they map out the story arcs.

On the direction of Season 3:

John Landgraf has always said, “Satisfy the audience at the end of the season, but leave some questions dangling,” so we had a couple of big questions to explore, the biggest being Raylan (Timothy Olyphant) and Winona (Natalie Zea), and then also Boyd (Walton Goggins) and Ava (Joelle Carter). So, we knew we wanted to go at that. The other thing was, “Okay, we had this big bad guy antagonist with Mags Bennett (Margo Martindale), so how do we fill that vacuum.”
So, we filled that, but also remembered that Boyd is now stepping up. The goal of this series is to never lose focus on the fact that the central relationship is Boyd and Raylan, and we wanted to bring that more to the fore, this year.
And then, I’m always looking for something thematic to hang a season on. Season 2 was feud. This year, it’s crossing the line. We’ll see various characters, at various points, crossing the line. What is the cost of that, and what does that tell us about them? You’ll see Boyd, Ava and Raylan cross the line. Where is that line for Raylan? That’s something that we wanted to explore.

On how the criminal element of Harlan will impact the season:

At the end of the second season, we were heading toward more conflict between Raylan and Boyd, and yet, into the mix comes Quarles (Neal McDonough). As you’ll see the season develop, Quarles is someone that everyone can agree to hate. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. We’re interested in that, and how Raylan and Boyd are brought together in a shared animosity for this guy. That’s the fun of an outsider coming into anything, especially when he’s flamboyant, violent, smart and twisted. That’s fun to play with.

On how far ahead they plan the story arcs and tentpoles:

Yeah, we plan the main arc for the season. We think to the seasons ahead, but we started in our writing this year in the middle of July. As we started to talk about what the season could be, we were also talking about Season 4. It’s about, “What do we want to do this year, that could set up another year?” Once we then get rolling in August, on breaking Season 3, we forget about Season 4.
Now, as we’re heading towards the end of this season, we’re getting back into thinking about that again. Where do we want to go? What’s the undiscovered country that we still have to explore? There can be just little, faint inklings of how the series could end, but that’s just too far down the road.
In terms of the season, after a certain point, the map gets really indistinct, but we have targets. I knew that, in Episode 11, there’s going to be a robbery and something to do with that. We toyed around with this and that, and then it just gelled into what it’s going to be, but that goal for that episode remained intact. We had an outline for our fourth episode, and Tim read it and said, “I really think this should be two episodes,” so we split it, which was great because we had already broken part of a story and were one episode further down the line.

Source: Collider

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