Justified showrunner Graham Yost appeared at the New York Television Festival last night and offered some snippets of information about the show’s upcoming season (including Patton Oswalt’s guest appearance), which is all fine and good and I will get to it in a minute, but not before we discuss something much more important first: Dickie Bennett’s hair. I have been fascinated by it for months, to the point where I once wrote a 1200-word post on Tumblr discussing its appearance and potential origins. So, needless to say, I was very excited that Yost provided some clarity about the whole situation during the interview.
“We don’t know what’s gonna happen with Dickie, nor do we know what’s gonna happen with Dickie’s hair,” Yost said. “In season 3, Jeremy [Davies] showed up and that was his haircut. He had cut it himself, and we said, ‘Okay, let’s go with that.’” [EW]
YES. To all of that. From Jeremy Davies taking it upon himself to mangle his head with an electric razor before showing up to his on-camera job, to Graham Yost being all “Hey, cool hair. ACTION!,” to Davies apparently having the green light to go bonkers with it again. The whole thing is perfect and I would take it out for a steak dinner if I could.
Okay, now that we got that out of the way, let’s get to the other important piece of business: Patton Oswalt’s role in the upcoming season:
He plays Constable Bob. “There’s this weird thing in Kentucky where each county has one or two constables, and it’s an elected position, but your salary is, like, $2,000 a year. You’ve got to pay for your own car, your own light bar, your own uniform. But what they get to do with that is serve papers,” Yost explained. “And they can charge $60 for serving papers, whereas the State Police has to charge $80. So they undercut the State Police, and that’s how they make money. So we just liked the idea of this sort of cop wannabe, who’s kind of a cop, interacting with Raylan some.”
Oh God, that sounds great. Like, really great. You know what? This news can come to the steak dinner with me and the stuff about Dickie Bennett’s hair, too. Steaks all around! Lemme call my man Dickie and set it up.
I miss this show so much.