Jonathan Storm: Calif. plays Kentucky on 'Justified'

FILLMORE, Calif. - East of the I-5, Henry Mayo Drive swings past Valencia Travel Village, clotted with hundreds of trailers and RVs, where the snowbirds stay in winter. Then it skirts the Chiquita Canyon Landfill and its huge earth movers and compactors, organizing garbage into mountains.

Migrants work the lettuce fields as the road changes counties, crossing from Los Angeles to Ventura, and changes its name to Telegraph Road. You're traveling to a wondrous land whose boundaries are those of imagination. There's no signpost up ahead, but your next stop is - Kentucky.

"You've got to be able to fake Kentucky," says TV director Michael Watkins, who's spending this January day doing just that in sunny Southern California. He's aided by three entertainment pros who grew up in Philadelphia, and are now helping to make an episode of FX's Justified, perhaps the best drama on TV, which returned for its second season last week. (You can catch up Tuesday night, from 11:59 p.m. to 1 a.m. Wednesday, when FX repeats the episode. The show is telecast regularly Wednesdays at 10 p.m.)

After a monumental gunfight in last season's finale at a lonely shack in a place called Bulletville (played by another part of California), Kentucky's Harlan County has lost its prime public enemy. Bo Crowder seemed irreplaceable, but Mags Bennett will give it a go in Season 2.

Margo Martindale, better known for playing nosy neighbors (The Riches) or warmhearted, if officious, file clerks (Dexter), appears to be having the time of her life as the matriarch of a clan with a long history as eastern Kentucky's top pot growers. She's no swaggering gunslinger like Bo, but her influence runs deeper, and she may be more evil.

There's a Bennett town police car right next to the Harlan County sheriff's car, in the lot where people wait for the shuttle up a rutted ranch road to the shoot. Marshal Raylan Givens' big Lincoln is up where cameras are rolling.

Givens, played by Timothy Olyphant, is the soul of the show. Created in a short story by crime-writing legend Elmore Leonard, he's a former Kentucky coal miner, son of Arlo Givens, a two-bit crook whom Raylan plugged last season before he went after Bo.

On the docket today is a complex scene in which poor Arlo gets shot again.