10 reasons 'Justified' rocked

* JUSTIFIED. 10 p.m. tomorrow, FX.

ONE WAY or another, TV's waving goodbye to Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) tomorrow, and all I'm hoping at this point is that he'll be waving back.

My limited appetite for violence notwithstanding, I've loved (almost) every minute of the six seasons of "Justified," FX's Elmore Leonard-inspired drama about a trigger-happy deputy U.S. marshal who can't escape his upbringing in hardscrabble Harlan County, Ky.

Here are 10 reasons:

10. Patton Oswalt's Constable Bob Sweeney.

"Before you try to seduce me, just know it's been tried before," Bob said to Ava (Joelle Carter) in last week's episode, a callback to a Season 4 appearance in which a teenage fugitive apparently did make the awkwardly earnest lawman an offer he was able to refuse.

Even on a show that excelled at guest casting - Mary Steenburgen! Sam Elliott! Mykelti Williamson! - Oswalt has shone.

9. The language.

Harlan County may have been depicted as a poor and lawless place, but "Justified" also showed it to be rich in vernacular, with characters whose limited education didn't necessarily limit their vocabularies. How much of that is true to "Appalachian English" and how much was the writers' own love for language, I can't say, but it's made for good listening.

8. Elmore Leonard loved the show, and stayed involved.

The prolific writer, who died in August 2013 and is still credited as an executive producer, did more than contribute the characters from the short story, "Fire in the Hole," on which the pilot was based.

"If I'm going to be an executive producer and get paid for it, I feel I should be working," Leonard told reporters in 2012, the same year he published "Raylan."

"Elmore was generous enough to say, 'Just hang this book up, and strip it for parts,' " recalled executive producer Graham Yost.

"I'm amazed sometimes that they've got the characters better than I put them on paper," said Leonard.

7. "Justified" never lost sight of what made Leonard great, and ripe for adaptation.

"You can almost pick up any Elmore Leonard book and just flip through the pages and stop somewhere randomly and there's a great scene. I mean, just a great scene. Just shoot it. It's all set up to shoot," Olyphant told me in an interview in 2010. "You read his books and you get why there is a Quentin Tarantino."

6. Kaitlyn Dever's Loretta McCready.

In a show full of adult characters who are still working through their high-school baggage, this adolescent drug dealer's often been the only grown-up in the room. Fingers crossed she sees 21.

As for Dever, who doesn't get to be quite this interesting in "Last Man Standing," I doubt drama junkies have seen the last of her.

5. The acknowledgment that there should be limits on Raylan's authority to shoot people, whether he acknowledged them or not.

In 2015, I'm not sure I'd be as comfortable with the Raylan Givens of 2010. Just saying.

4. Joelle Carter's Ava Crowder.

When Carter signed on for the pilot, she didn't know if Ava would be continuing. But she did know the character, thanks to Leonard's "Fire in the Hole," where Ava's introduced as a high-school acquaintance of Raylan's who's just killed her abusive husband.

"She's fiery, she's sexual, she's an opportunist," Carter told me in January. "She had great potential for violence, obviously, and came from a world of violence. And she was born again, in a way. She wanted to start over."

3. Margo Martindale's Mags Bennett.

One of the best TV villains ever? Probably.

Playing the matriarch of a backwoods crime family in Season 2 won the veteran character actress an Emmy. She described Mags as "the most delicious, powerful, incredibly insane, fantastic part I've ever gotten."

2. Walton Goggins' Boyd Crowder.

Boyd surviving the pilot - in Leonard's story, Raylan killed him - may have been the best thing for "Justified," but Boyd may also be the best reason for ending it before things get silly. Because the dance between these two can't, realistically, go on forever.

Boyd, who began "Justified" as a white supremacist who robbed banks and started a church because he didn't want to pay taxes, has grown, through his love for Ava, into someone considerably more interesting, but no less deadly. Charm can only take him so far.

1. Timothy Olyphant's laconic, note-perfect Raylan Givens.

As much as I liked Olyphant in "Deadwood," it's hard to think of him as anyone but Raylan, and Raylan seems ready to let go of a past that's not doing him any good. I only hope he gets the chance.