2 series’ heroes move in gray areas

The arrivals this week of “The Chicago Code” and “Justified” couldn’t have been timed better, and not just because these two excellent shows will cure even the worst cases of cabin fever.

As it happens, they both grapple with a dilemma that is suddenly on the minds of everyone who watches the news: whether it is better to keep the peace or to be on the right side of history.

Peacekeeping, as fans of FX’s “Justified” know by now, is something Raylan Givens does every time he reaches for his trusty sidearm. But in this second season of last year’s best new drama, Raylan is after a different kind of order and stability. It’s the kind of peace that’s possible only when you set down your weapon and do business with people who, by all rights, ought to be behind bars.

“Justified” fans are well-acquainted with the back story: Elmore Leonard, the dean of gritty crime novelists, introduced Givens as a character for our times, a deputy U.S. marshal from the hollers of Kentucky who heads off to Miami Beach to deliver his special brand of justice to the drug kingpins there, procedure be damned.

Leonard moved Raylan back home to Harlan County 10 years ago in the novella “Fire in the Hole. “ Raylan couldn’t turn around without bumping into someone with whom he had a morally tangled past. The story suggested myriad possibilities to Graham Yost, a writer of ’90s blockbusters (“Speed,” “Broken Arrow”) who endeared himself to TV critics with his short-lived crime drama on NBC, “Boomtown.”

Such a character-rich and culturally specific premise rarely comes to TV, and Yost made sure it had a fighting chance: He took it to the edgiest network in basic cable.

To bring you up to speed, Season 1 ended with a standoff that had Raylan and local outlaw Boyd Crowder (played by the reliably wigged-out Walton Goggins) taking fire from emissaries of a Miami drug lord who had a history with them both. The two-minute-long gun battle – replayed at the beginning of Wednesday’s episode – was the climax of a grand story arc that had worked its way through the full season.

“Our audience really got caught up in the story in the last four episodes,” Yost said. “We’re going to get that big story going early on, pull out of it a little, and then come back into it.”

That story is wrapped around the ever-present coal industry in eastern Kentucky. For Season 2, Yost took a road trip to Lexington and Harlan County with some of his writers. Most of his team (all guys except for one) has network writing experience, and they’ll take cable.

“Justified” may have some competition for writing honors with “The Chicago Code,” which FX’s big sister Fox unveils two days before “Justified.” “Code” comes to us via producer Shawn Ryan, who single-handedly vaulted FX to the top tier of cable channels in 2003 with “The Shield.”

What’s so brilliant about “The Chicago Code” is that it’s essentially “The Shield” retold from the good guys’ point of view. You have your bad guy, but he’s powerful, so that makes him a good guy to anyone he helps or enables. And you have people who want to take him down, but because he’s president of the favor bank, you find yourself opening an account with him, just like those lowlifes he surrounds himself with.

After “The Shield,” Ryan co-created his first network show, “The Unit,” for CBS and then toiled at “Lie to Me” on Fox. This network experience has served him well, as becomes clear from the opening scene of “The Chicago Code.” It’s a narrated flashback – one of those concessions to network storytelling that keeps the casual viewer from reaching for the remote – and it’s told from the viewpoint of our hero, Teresa Colvin (Jennifer Beals), newly minted superintendent of the Chicago PD.

Against a gorgeous lakefront view of the city we hear Beals say, “Growing up I witnessed firsthand the effects of the Chicago way.”

Ryan’s use of unreliable narrators is one of several ways he imposes his cable sensibility on the network formula to great effect.

Another is his choice of villain: Ronin Gibbons (Delroy Lindo), fixer extraordinaire and a master of the city’s ethnic politics. In front of the cameras, he’s one part Al Sharpton, one part legendary South Side alderman “Fast Eddie” Vrdolyak.

As we soon learn, Gibbons controls the police board that approved Colvin’s promotion, and the ties that bind them add a dimension to his character as well as hers. After all, if your connections help an ally do some good in the world, doesn’t that mean you’re doing good, too?

Oscar-winners will be performing

Don Mischer and Bruce Cohen, producers of the 83rd Annual Academy Awards, have lined up the talent who will perform the Oscar-nominated songs during the ceremony on Feb. 27.

Gwyneth Paltrow, who won the lead actress Oscar for 1998’s “Shakespeare in Love,” will perform “Coming Home” from her latest film, “Country Strong.” A.R. Rahman, who won Academy Awards two years ago for score and song for “Slumdog Millionaire,” and Florence Welch of Florence + the Machine, will perform “I Rise” from the film “127 Hours.” Rahman is nominated for writing the music, Dido and Rollo Armstrong are up for their lyrics.

Alan Menken, who has won eight Oscars including best score and song for “Beauty and the Beast,” which he shared with Howard Ashman, from the 1991 Disney classic of the same name, will accompany singers Mandy Moore and Zachary Levi on his latest Oscar-nominated tune, “I See the Light” from “Tangled.” Glenn Slater wrote the song’s lyrics.

And Randy Newman will perform his nominated song, “We Belong Together” from “Toy Story 3.”

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