Justified: City Primeval, a stand-alone 8-episode series

As a stone Justified fan, I'm just not sure what to make of FX's new limited series revival, Justified: City Primeval.

On the surface, it offers what any good revival does: The bracing, nostalgia-laced return of a beloved character — Timothy Olyphant's modern-day, Stetson-wearing lawman Raylan Givens — in a new adventure. This time, it's based on a novel by the legendary author who created Givens, Elmore Leonard, set in Detroit, instead of the Kentucky hollers and small towns where the original "Justified" series took place.

Having moved to Miami, Givens is still a US Marshal, but now one juggling his obligations by raising a teenage daughter (Vivian Olyphant, the star’s real-life kid making her acting debut), who offers a “Kim Bauer in ’24’”-type reminder that cop shows seldom benefit from incorporating kids. Indeed, chalk this up as another instance where the attempt to humanize the hero through fatherhood simply feels like a distraction.

Lucky for Raylan and for us, the vintage appointment-viewing vibes don’t stop there. With eight episodes tracing the spine of the novel Leonard subtitled High Noon in Detroit, there’s no time for streaming-era shapelessness or table-setting – every installment of Raylan’s unexpected layover in the Motor City has multiple engines driving the plot down twisty roads, toward a destination of television pulp that’s immensely satisfying and occasionally shocking. (Skittish about dental trauma? Maybe make other plans for the week of episode 4.) Some of the turns are telegraphed from the outset, but what’s less foreseeable is the number of interested parties who converge on the scene: Cops, mobsters, lawyers, grifters, a judge, a Jack White wannabe, and a never-was bass player all trying to get one over on everybody else. And at the center of it all is a guy you can clock coming down the hallway from the silhouette of his hat.

Six seasons of Justified later, we felt we’d stuck the landing, and we thought that was that. But then, a few years after that, Elmore Leonard’s son Peter called me and asked if I’d like to develop a totally new series based on Elmore’s novel City Primeval. I knew that book pretty well—we’d all read it when we were working on Justified—so I started working on that as a possible next project.

I knew Tim Olyphant was interested, because he called me about it from set with Quentin Tarantino [who adapted Leonard’s novel Rum Punch into his 1997 film Jackie Brown, reviving the careers of Pam Grier and Robert Forster in the process], saying, “Well, we thought it might make a great year of Justified.” I said I’d think it through, and when I mentioned it a year later in a meeting with FX, they said, “Oh yeah, Tim called us about it a year ago, and we’d be really interested in it as a year of Justified.” I pitched it as its own thing and they said, “Yeah, we love this, but we’d like to see your Justified take on it.”

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Sarah H

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