The Pitch: A famous filmmaker once said, “Films are never completed; they’re only abandoned.” (George Lucas often gets credit for the quote, but he attributes it to another famous filmmaker.) Doesn’t matter who originated it because those words carry a very different meaning in our current Hollywood landscape.
Stories are rarely if ever, finished these days, because there’s always a reason for more once the curtains close. Maybe these stories resurrect for creative reasons. More often than not, the motivation starts and ends with someone’s bank account, but sometimes it’s both. Either way, we live in a world where no one dares utter the phrase “And then they lived happily ever after…” because there’s a good chance that beloved piece of pop culture will find its way back into our lives sooner rather than later.
Enter Justified: City Primeval, the next chapter to FX’s Justified, which ended its six-season run in 2015. Starring Timothy Olyphant as U.S. Deputy Marshal Raylan Givens, City Primeval has the unenviable task of carrying that acclaimed show’s weight on its shoulders and adding more chapters to a story that stuck the landing with aplomb eight years ago. Not only that, the eight-episode limited series features an older Raylan in Detroit and not in Kentucky, which strips the show of a familiar setting and characters that fans came to adore like a warm blanket: New city, new characters, and none of the trappings that made Justified, well, Justified.
And yet, against all those odds, Justified: City Primeval exceeds even the highest expectations. Rather than recreate what came before, this series finds its footing by keeping true to the world — and rules — author Elmore Leonard created, while still finding new challenges for the U.S. Deputy Marshal who rocks the Stetson and treats every situation like he’s Gary Cooper in High Noon.
The City: The Justified writing staff wore rubber bands with “WWED” (What Would Elmore Do?) etched as a reminder. City Primeval, created by two of those writers, succeeds because they carried that mantra forward. Full stop. The events in the series unfold for the same reasons they did in the 2010 series: greed, ego, stupidity, recklessness, and, of course, luck. The show’s criminals, most notably Clement Mansell (Boyd Holbrook), often find themselves on the wrong end of the barrel thanks to stupid actions at the wrong place at increasingly wrong times.
The show underlines this point by establishing a petty inciting incident that gets Raylan from Florida to Detroit. And the only reason the sociopathic Mansell gets on Raylan’s radar is that a set of proverbial dominos just happened to fall in the Marshal’s direction.
Justified: City Primeval (FX)
Keeping with the spirit of the series that came before, the author who created this character, and the book on which this series is based, City Primeval makes its plotting seem so effortless that only on a rewatch does the work really show itself. Every conversation, even the seemingly innocuous ones, carries weight. The dialogue sings the way Justified fans expect. While character movements and shots from earlier in the season reveal more profound meaning later. Like the best seasons of Justified, this 2023 model evolves as the story progresses and its characterizations deepen.
The People: Like Kentucky, Detroit has its own flavor, and that’s illustrated to significant effect through the people surrounding Raylan this time around. It goes without saying that Detroit represents more racial diversity than the rural holler that is Harlan County, and the show sticks to that reality.
But it’s more than just dropping Raylan into a melting pot, giving him a Black partner, and commenting that he sticks out like a green hat with an orange bill in an upper-class Black neighborhood. City Primeval explores its Black characters’ inner lives and sometimes even juxtaposes their lived experience with his, mainly through Carolyn Wilder (Aunjanue Ellis), Mansell’s ambitious lawyer — why is this intelligent woman with her own legal practice defending the psychopath?
That’s part of the show’s charm, and it answers it throughout several episodes while exploring Detroit’s socio-politics. Her background and motivation give her scenes with Raylan an underlying complexity that challenges both characters. The fact that Olyphant and Ellis have more chemistry than the periodic table pushes those scenes further. Wilder continues the Justified tradition of fully realized, beautifully written women who unexpectedly expose Raylan to a different perspective.
But no woman in the series does that more than Willa Givens (Vivian Olyphant) — Raylan’s baby girl from the original series finale is now a full-blown teenager. Knowing Olyphant’s actual daughter plays Willa, no doubt informs the relationship. However, the series is more interested in what fatherhood means for a man who still refuses a desk job even after all this time.
It’s clear from the jump that things are strained between the two, and without going into detail, that conflict comes with a surprising resolution, but fatherhood mellows Raylan to a degree. That notorious anger bubbling beneath his calm exterior only surfaces a few times during the series, but it’s certainly present. It’s fun watching Olyphant play Raylan as a man with something to lose now, as opposed to years ago when he practically avoided laying down roots or establishing any connections that might take him away from that badge.
Justified: City Primeval (FX)
