Jere Burns

Wynn Duffy, the fixer Jere Burns plays across 46 episodes of Justified (2010), lives in a caravan and keeps his eyebrows at a permanent angle of mild alarm. He runs errands for people with worse tempers, and he has usually worked out the odds before he opens his mouth. Gangsters from Detroit and families from the hills arrive with larger plans, and Duffy is still there after most of them have gone. Burns plays this not as cunning but as a man who would rather not be shot, and that is what makes him funny.

The equipment is the same: a narrow face, a rasp that lives behind the nose, and a stare that does not blink. Television used it early for sleaze. Kirk Morris, the ladies' man in the divorce support group of Dear John (1988), ran four seasons and set the pattern, and the sitcoms that followed, Bob (1992), The Mommies (1994) and Good Morning, Miami (2002), did not run long enough to break it. From 2010 the cable dramas took him in: Jesse Pinkman's counsellor in Breaking Bad (2010), a manipulative psychiatrist in Burn Notice (2011), a criminal leaning on Norma Bates in Bates Motel (2013). The man who had been playing the creep for laughs was being asked to play him for real, and found he could do both at once.

That is what Justified uses. Graham Yost's scripts gave Burns better sentences than any sitcom had, and he says them as if they cost money. Duffy threatens people while sounding slightly bored, and apologises while plainly meaning the threat. By the fourth season we were pleased every time the caravan came into shot, and a little ashamed of it, since he is not a nice man; the pleasure was in watching a frightened man think while everyone around him, Olyphant's marshal included, reached for a gun.

Angie Tribeca (2016) brought him back to comedy as Lieutenant Chet Atkins. The method is the same. He has said he likes to forget that anything he is doing is funny and play it as deadly seriously as possible, and Atkins shouts nonsense at Rashida Jones's detective as if he believed every word. He is best when the shouting is about nothing at all. He is less good when the Carells hand him an actual joke, because a joke needs acknowledging, and acknowledging is the one thing Burns will not do. Watch five episodes running and the shouting blurs.

The work depends on who is writing for him, and the long parts have been in other people's shows. Give him a decent sentence and a reason to be nervous and he will get more out of a minor hoodlum than the part was written to hold. Without the sentence he is a face and a rasp, and television has plenty of those.