Copyright 2023, FX Networks. All rights reserved. Credit: Kurt Iswarienko/FXYou knew we hadn’t seen the end of Raylan Givens.
Timothy Olyphant is back in the Stetson cowboy hat as Givens, the deputy U.S. Marshal from Kentucky made famous by Elmore Leonard’s crime novels and the FX series Justified (2010-15).
The new eight-episode limited series Justified: City Primeval is based on Leonard’s 1980 novel City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit and debuts with the first two episodes on Tuesday, July 18, at 10pm ET/PT.
Fear not, Justified fans. Raylan is in good hands with creatives Graham Yost, Dave Andron, Michael Dinner and other Justified veterans — plus Peter Leonard, son of the late Elmore — back for City Primeval. It’s not Justified Season 7, nor is it a full-blown series reboot. It’s what FX is calling “an extension of the universe” of Justified, and the viewer can jump right in to City Primeval without any prior run-ins with Raylan.
“We felt we could take this story that we really liked a lot and we could inject Raylan into it and tonally do a show that’s similar, but also let the show that we did grow up a little bit,” says writer/director/executive producer Dinner. “We felt that what we’ve done is something that is true to the show, but not the same show.”
Olyphant was fully onboard. “I really didn’t have any concerns,” he says. “I love these guys. And Elmore Leonard and Graham Yost gave us so much material to launch what I’ve always thought was potentially numerous stories. I thought as long as we were still in the Elmore Leonard world and the Graham Yost world that the two of them created, I just thought I’d love to be there for it.”
City Primeval opens with Givens on his way to drop off his teenage daughter, Willa (played by Olyphant’s daughter Vivian), at camp in Florida. But their road trip takes a wildly different course when Givens arrests two would-be carjackers, one of whom has outstanding warrants in Michigan. Now stuck with Willa, Givens has to testify in Detroit. Unfortunately, the judge in the case (a brilliant Keith David) has lots of enemies and was the target of an assassination attempt that morning. A twist of interconnected characters and events that could only happen in Leonardland results in Givens matching wits with the sociopathic Clement “The Oklahoma Wildman” Mansell (Boyd Holbrook) and his girlfriend Sandy Stanton (Adelaide Clemens).
Australian actress Clemens (Rectify, The Great Gatsby) steps into femme fatale Sandy’s chunky heels. As a casino cocktail waitress, Sandy has a nice side hustle turning high-rolling men into easy marks. “She’s kind of always looking for a high,” Clemens says of Sandy. “She’s into conning people, she loves her weed and there’s a certain rush to being out of your head. I think it’s the only way she knows how to operate.” Unlike her psychotic boyfriend, Sandy has some moral boundaries. “She can kind of go along for the ride to a certain extent, but she doesn’t ever take it as far as killing people,” Clemens says.
Elmore Leonard excelled at tapping into that moral gray area that good guys and bad guys share. In City Primeval, defense lawyer Carolyn Wilder (Aunjanue Ellis) excels at getting dangerous perpetrators off the hook on technicalities, and those sworn to uphold the law and serve justice are corruptible.
“He would love this new series,” Peter Leonard says of his father. “His book City Primeval, I think, is one of his crown jewels. … It is such great TV, eight just wonderfully suspenseful episodes with a great cast supporting it all.”
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