"Raylan County, KY."

People act like the latest season of Justified was the vindicating flaming sword of justice in the hands of the returning Christ-Child mounted on an elephant, come for your sinful enemies, but it wasn't.

I kept watching it to see if anything would turn up, as usually it does, but this time it really didn't.

Of course New York magazine elected to declare it this week's "heir to the Sopranos" at this point. What'd the Sopranos ever get us anyway? Boardwalk Empire. Or, as it's known, The Implausible in Pursuit of the Unintelligible. Who among you buys Steve Buscemi as a mob boss?

Last season of Justified was a Dick Tracy arc of excesses and grotesques. It was Justified over-heating, over-reaching itself and turning into a cartoon, but it was a total swell to behold. Even when they stole the shock of the arm-chopping motif from Big Love it was fine. The season before that, the old Harlan County, Which Side Are You On? bit, I thought at first was hard-going down a terminal mine-shaft but when I watched it again on DVD it was full of subtle delights. Principally, the Bennetts.

The first season of Justified, as I believe I noted elsewhere, is a protracted version of a Road Runner cartoon, or Sylvester & Tweetie Pie, or Tom & Jerry. Punisher versus Wolverine. You get the idea. They managed to sustain that somehow but I think the ghost got coughed up this season. What's left to say between Raylan and Boyd? They need to shit or get off the pot. "Get a room."

This season blew partially from bad "American Southron Gothic" mis-writing and terminally purple over-writing. They cranked up the good-old-boy trash-talking into turbo overdrive but that didn't work, it just choked the viewer with exhaust fumes.

Raylan Givens was so full of liquid smarm and drawling olde county saws that he was rendered nonsensical and vapid. It was like he stepped out of a Foxfire book and was going to show us how to whittle a banjo from a gourd but that was about all he'd contribute. He'd smirk and squint for money. Conversely, Boyd Crowder worked like a dray horse. That boy was all over the shop, both figuratively and literally. That poor old boy don't know if he's coming or going, whether he's a prophet or a small-time oxycontin dealer. I missed the days when he was the snake-handling born-again blood-drinking Great Awakening come-outer. "Thems was good times, sho." Now it's all just ambling around the bar and the trailer park looking for his script and his teeth-whitener.

After the grotesques of last season the "bad guy" this season was a nebulous identikit bald guy. A poor man's Vic Mackey. That pepped-up screen hood Wynn Duffy was better than this. I was actually relieved when Wynn Duffy sauntered into a scene this season. Raylan dispatched this same nameless, nebulous "bad guy" as an afterthought. Why he did it with a phone call. He really did phone it in. You got the sense that his nonchalance was mirrored by the geek assholes at the writers' long table too. Phoned-in. They're just so happy they're in Hollywood in the sunshine and they're getting laid and they can live out their Turtle-from-Entourage fantasies.

Good luck to 'em. I like Hollywood. I especially like walking in the hills and going to the Laurel Canyon store to buy a packet of the red Monster Munch for a dollar, which is actually cheaper than they cost at Heathrow Airport or even (depending on the exchange rate) in a Waitrose.

It's cheaper to buy the six pack than a single packet.

At Heathrow, they were selling three packets of crisps for £3, and they called that a "sale."