Justified: The Complete First Season (Sony, three DVDs). In this cable-TV series, Graham Yost takes U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, one of Elmore Leonard’s most attractive recurring characters, and returns him to Kentucky’s Harlan County for a series of freshly written adventures that have the true Leonard touch. Timothy Olyphant, who plays Givens, is exactly, exquisitely right. You can’t follow the second season on FX without knowing what happened last year, so if you’re coming late to the party, buy this box set first and savor each episode (TT).

Ricky Riccardi, What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong’s Later Years (Pantheon, $28.95, out June 21). I can’t do any better than to repeat my dust-jacket blurb: “The later years of Louis Armstrong are one of the most fascinating untold tales in the history of jazz. What a Wonderful World is indispensable to anyone with a serious interest in the greatest jazz musician of the twentieth century.” If you liked Pops, you need to read this book (TT).

A Minister’s Wife (Mitzi Newhouse Theater, Lincoln Center, closes June 12). The most important new musical since The Light in the Piazza, a near-operatic version of George Bernard Shaw’s Candida that improves on the original (TT).

Jane Freilicher: Recent Paintings and Prints (Tibor de Nagy, 724 Fifth Ave., up through June 3). Ten new paintings and works on paper–including an affordable color lithograph–by the American Bonnard, an artist of deceptive simplicity and uncanny sensitivity whose work grows ever more lyrical with each passing year (TT).

Jazz: The Smithsonian Anthology (Smithsonian Folkways, six CDs). No “canonical” collection of important jazz recordings can hope to be definitive, but this one, which contains 111 tracks and is accompanied by a two-hundred-page book, comes as close as you’re likely to get, certain startling omissions notwithstanding (mostly, I regret to say, of such important white instrumentalists as Bobby Hackett, Red Nichols, Pee Wee Russell, Red Norvo, and Dave Tough). The accompanying notes are by a cross-section of well-known jazz scholars and commentators, myself among them. Several distressing flaws notwithstanding, this is a serious and largely admirable piece of work (TT).

The Motherf**ker with the Hat (Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, 236 W. 45, closes June 26). Don’t be put off by the dumb title–Stephen Adly Guirgis’ new play is a smart, tightly written comedy of working-class manners, crisply staged by Anna D. Shapiro (August: Osage County) and performed by a superlative ensemble cast led by Bobby Cannavale (Win Win). Chris Rock, who is making his stage debut, is the draw, and he’s pretty good, too, for the most part. The play’s the thing, though, and it won’t let you down, not even for a split-second (TT).

Car 54 Where Are You?: Complete First Season (Shanachie, four DVDs). All thirty episodes of the 1961-62 season of one of the most clever and well-made situation comedies ever to appear on American television. Nat Hiken, who made Phil Silvers a TV star, did the same for Fred Gwynne and Joe E. Ross in this zany portrait of a squad-car team who troll the Bronx in search of trouble–all of which happens to them. An absolute must for golden-age TV buffs (TT).

Romare Bearden Collage: A Centennial Celebration (Michael Rosenfeld, 24 W. 57, up through May 21). Twenty-one richly colored, rewardingly complex, and beautifully hung collages made between 1964 and 1983 by one of the great American modernists. Essential viewing (TT).