Why The Creator Of Justified Didn't Sell The Show To HBO

With a script based on an Elmore Leonard short story and a showrunner like Graham Yost, "Justified" always seemed like an easy sell. Pairing the acclaimed writer of "Get Shorty," "Out of Sight," and "Rum Punch" (later adapted into the Quentin Tarantino film "Jackie Brown") with a screenwriter, director, and producer who had worked on "Speed" and "Band of Brothers" was a slam dunk, and "Justified" quickly became a hot commodity.

The series was pitched to eight networks. According to Yost, six wanted to move forward with the project. In the end, the choice came down to FX and HBO. Given Yost's previous work on HBO's "Band of Brothers" and "The Pacific," and star Timothy Olyphant's history working with the network on "Deadwood," you might think it would have been a no-brainer. And for Yost, it was. Just not in the direction one might have expected at the time. A big part of the decision to take the show to FX was its president, John Landgraf, who had previously worked on another adaptation from Leonard's work, "Karen Sisco."

As Yost put it in an UPROXX oral history of the series, "he understood [Leonard] and what it meant to try to do that right on television." But just as importantly, according to Yost, HBO really didn't.

For as much as HBO has done right in the television world, it's kind of amazing to read Graham Yost's tale of how badly they misunderstood Elmore Leonard's material. Famous for his witty, intelligent characters and next-level dialogue, Leonard's seedy criminal underworlds have always been buoyed by humor. Recounting his pitch to HBO, Yost said at the 2022 ATX TV Festival:

"I was pitching my heart out and they were giving me nothing back. So I cut out all my jokes and they said it was my best pitch yet. I took out all my funny stuff! By the time I got to the elevators, they made me an offer. But we went with FX because we knew John Landgraf and his team would be open."

That seemed especially true to Yost after he made a very different pitch to FX, which Landgraf seemed to get immediately:

"I just summed up the show as a four-minute scene between a couple of bad guys talking about chicken, and that we could do those types of things where you didn't know what was going to happen. You didn't know if two people were going to become best friends or if one of them was going to shoot the other."

Yost's pitch cut straight to the heart of what really made "Justified" work — charismatic characters sharing lengthy scenes of nothing but mesmerizing dialogue and bucketloads of tension. Landgraf got from the start what "Justified" audiences would soon discover. A gritty crime drama is good and all, but it gets a whole lot better when you've characters on both sides of the law you can't help but love.