One More for the Bad Guy: Boyd Crowder is the Ultimate Anti-Hero Outlaw

In a landscape on television filled with anti-heroes, none do it better than Boyd Crowder on ‘Justified’…

By Damon Martin — Editor/Lead Writer

Television is still very much in the age of the anti-hero — a revolution that some argue started with Tony Soprano on ‘Sopranos — a rough and tumble bad guy that you can’t help but root for whenever he’s on screen. Throughout the course of ‘The Sopranos’, Tony did some vile things to people he loved, but regardless of that scowl you carried whenever he carried it out, by the end of the episode you were usually smiling again.

The same could be said for any number of anti-hero types on television, past or present. Dexter was an entire show centered around the ultimate anti-hero — a serial killer who murders bad guys that somehow always seem to slip through the system. Shows like ‘Sons of Anarchy’ are solely focused on the anti-hero movement with the series’ protagonists all being involved in criminal activities, and sometimes they are just down right villainous, but inevitably you tune in because you want to see them win. Would ‘Sons of Anarchy’ be the same show if the focus was all on the cops trying to bring them down? Not even close.

It’s that train of thinking that led me to Tuesday night’s viewing schedule and the best anti-hero currently on TV since Walter White laid down with a gunshot wound while the sweet sounds of Badfinger washed over him until he left this world. ‘Justified’s Boyd Crowder started out in the pilot of the long running FX show as a neo-Nazi gang leader running a gang of white supremacists out of an old, abandoned church. He was everything you wanted to hate in a TV character — racist, redneck, abusive, and unabashedly unapologetic for anything he’s done. He was the perfect foil for our new good guy with an edge, Raylan Givens. Raylan started ‘Justified’ by blowing away a mobster who failed to leave town when the U.S. Marshal told him that was his only option if he wanted to live. The idea, at least based on my dissection of the show, was that Raylan was set to be the anti-hero on ‘Justified’ but there has to be someone even worse out there for him to chase down and defeat so it’s all worth something.

So at the end of the pilot, Raylan once again drew down on a man — this time it was his old coal mining buddy Boyd Crowder. Justice was served, and the series was off to a running start. Raylan dispatched of a bad guy, far worse than the anti-hero label he’d be carrying around, and ‘Justified’ had a great first episode to sell the series to FX. The only problem was Boyd’s portrayal by Walton Goggins from ‘The Shield’ was so good and so compelling that the show runner behind it all, Graham Yost, wasn’t sure if he could let him go after a single episode. Boyd was the definition of a backwater crime boss, and an excellent antagonist for Raylan throughout the series.

“I remember this phone call I had with Walton, I remember I was in a car, I remember where I was going and I was calling up and saying, “Walton, we’re thinking that maybe Boyd Crowder should live,” because we were remembering that we killed him when we shot the pilot and then decided to bring him back to life,” Yost said recently about the character.

“And Walton was thrilled. And I remember him talking about other things that Boyd could get involved in. We came up with the idea of him finding religion in that first season. And we like the idea of Boyd getting sort of passionately attached to things.”

So as season one moved forward, Boyd did find attachments like religion and eventually a notion to take over his daddy’s crime empire. The people closest to Boyd were drawn by loyalty and a sense of family, and as each season passed the character continued to evolve. Eventually, Boyd was paired up with his former sister-in-law Ava, and together they started to form a life together while slowly amassing more criminal territories around Kentucky and a slew of enemies knocking at their front door — rarely, however, were any of them with badges or named Raylan Givens.

Over the last two seasons, Boyd has really come into his own as a character under the brilliantly over the top and silky smooth performance courtesy of Walton Goggins. His Southern draw and eloquent vocabulary draw you in, but on a moment’s notice he changes gears and when his eyes go wide, a chilling shudder crawls over your spine because Boyd Crowder is still the most dangerous man in Harlan County.

In season five alone, Boyd has turned the tables and flipped things around numerous ways to get a situation to his advantage. Like taking an old coal miner buddy, who was dying of black lung, and promising his family would be taken care of in exchange for him walking into a diner full of people with everyone around serving as witnesses, and blowing away a sheriff’s deputy with too many fingers in the cookie jar. Then there was the moment just a couple of episodes back where Boyd finally dispatched of his venomous cousin Johnny after some good old fashioned trickery lured him to the middle of the desert with a million dollars in cash before him and his entire crew were shot dead. And finally — we can’t forget poor Mr. Picker, who wanted Boyd as dead as Dillinger, but instead caught a blast from a packet of cigarettes laced with explosives that tore him in half, and allowed the dark and wild haired crime leader another slip screen escape.

Through all of this evil treachery, the one thing Boyd was unable to control was freeing the love of his life from the chains of a prison cell. He carried a disheveled look when he was forced to kill a senior citizen to help Ava secure a drug trade so she could stay safe proved Boyd still had a conscience, and through each painful visit, the couple grew further and further apart. Ava was forced to go to depths she probably didn’t even know she could reach, and at some point she finally had to face the fact that there was no getting out, at least not any time soon. So Ava resigned herself to a life in prison, which mean letting Boyd go and the hurt behind his eyes was palpable. The sting of rejection from one’s true love had to feel like a dagger being buried into his chest, and probably hurt far worse than the bullet that penetrated him from Raylan’s gun in season one. Those human moments take you deep into the psyche of Boyd Crowder, and it’s a very conscious decision on the part of the writers of the show because they’ve managed to create a compelling character than in many ways has really become the central part of the show, pushing Raylan in some episodes to the outer skirts of the focus.

As the season five finale approaches on Tuesday, Boyd’s character still has some major issues to sort through while he will almost certainly become the focal point for Raylan and the Marshals throughout the course of the final year of ‘Justified’ in 2015. It’s also a noticeable shift in the fan base as people have flocked to Boyd’s cause over the many seasons, and now what was once a one episode wonder meant to cast a dark shadow over the real hero of the show, has now become just as important to its overall success.

“One of our guiding principles has been something that Elmore (Leonard) said to us when he was watching the episode through the first season, he said about Boyd, “I don’t believe a word he says, but I love to hear him say it.” But our thing is that Boyd believes it,” Yost said.

“And Boyd is really, the one anchor he’s had, the one thing he’s had is that he loves Ava. That’s the most important thing in his life. And yet, he makes certain decisions at the end of this season that sort of makes you wonder how important that is. And you’ll see what happens at the end of the season. We’ve evolved and our opinion of him has evolved, but there’s also a degree to which Boyd is always going to be Boyd.”

Boyd’s journey may end next season just because that’s the natural maturation of the hero vs. villain dynamic that shows like this are based upon, but that doesn’t mean he won’t have his own fair share of support saying he should be the one who survives and Raylan is the one that goes. It’s no different than finding a way to cheer on some of Quentin Tarantino’s more despicable outlaws in his films, or hoping deep down that Robert DeNiro escapes from Al Pacino’s long arm of the law in ‘Heat’ — there’s just something that feels so good about rooting for a bad guy.