How ‘Justified: City Primeval’ Pulled Off Reviving One of TV’s Greatest Shows Ever

Fans of laconic lawmen with a knack for terse, countrified eloquence, rejoice: Raylan Givens is back. Justified: City Primeval, a stand-alone eight-episode series, hits screens and streams on Hulu starting July 18.

(Warning: Some spoilers ahead.)

Eight years after Justified ended with the steely, quick-draw Deputy U.S. Marshal (Timothy Olyphant) happily transferred to Miami and sharing an ice cream with his daughter Willa (Timothy’s own daughter, Vivian Olyphant), Justified: City Primeval picks up with Raylan once again putting work first.

When an attempted carjacking in Florida becomes an ersatz prisoner-transport situation, Raylan and Willa find themselves on an unexpected detour to Detroit. Raylan’s performance on the witness stand piques the ire of brilliant defense lawyer Carolyn Wilder (Aunjanue Ellis) and the interest of Judge Alvin Guy (Keith David). Raylan—eager to hit the road with Willa for a father-daughter road trip back to Miami—reluctantly accepts the assignment to assist in the investigation of Judge Guy’s recent escape from a car bombing. As is so often the case for Raylan, a fairly straightforward situation grows increasingly complex and dangerous.

The car bombing turns out to have been not political, but simple petty vengeance by a white man angry that his mother is sleeping with a Black judge. Judge Guy and his clerk turn up dead, anyway, thanks to chilling new nemesis Clement Mansel, aka the Oklahoma Wildman (Boyd Holbrook). Detroit police assume the murders are part of a conspiracy to put an end to the judge’s infamous blackmail side hustle, which is the worst-kept secret among Detroit’s powerful. Instead, they were simply victims of bad timing and Mansel’s short temper.

Raylan can’t leave town now that there’s a real case to solve, but the ease with which Mansel gets close to Willa shows him she can’t stay. The situation devolves spectacularly from there, with everyone from Carolyn’s father figure Sweetie (Vondie Curtis-Hall) to the Albanian mafia getting messily involved. It’s twisty, crackingly good television.

Shortly before the SAG-AFTRA strike took effect, we sat down with showrunner Michael Dinner to learn about how Raylan found his way to Detroit, how he’s processing the existential dread of what to do with himself once he’s obliged to retire, and the pleasures of revisiting colorful characters who thrive in the gray areas of life (and death).

You have a rich, long history with Justified, and the original series wrapped up quite satisfyingly. What makes that world so enticing that you returned to it with Justified: City Primeval?

This is my second or third go-around with Elmore Leonard’s material, and what I’ve always loved about Elmore’s stuff is the tremendous opportunity for the writer or the director, because it really mixes it up, tonally. We like to say you don’t see the joke coming, you don’t see the violence coming, and you don’t see the emotion coming—and sometimes that’s even within the same breath. And I love his characters—he creates these protagonists that live in the gray zone. They’re good at what they do, but their personal life may be a mess: Raylan Givens has an itchy trigger finger and, like most men, is not very self-aware.

‘Justified: City Primeval’ Rekindles Everything That Made the Original a Perfect Show

So you have these flawed protagonists who you’d want to have watching your back because they’re good at what they do. And then Leonard creates antagonists who, sometimes they’re embraceable or redeemable. And even if they’re neither one, they’re just so interesting that you’re leaning forward to see what they do next. It's kind of what I think I do best, which is to kind of mix it up and have a mixture of thoughts about these complicated characters.

I think anyone who watched Justified would certainly agree with that.

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.”

I love that Olyphant was on the same page.

So during the pandemic, we put a room together. We weren’t trying so much to recapture the past or redo the show. We just loved working with each other. We were trying to recapture the feeling we had, tapping into that shorthand we developed on Justified. There were six writers who have worked together before on the original show, and we brought in a couple of new writers who work with us, the great Walter Mosley and Eisa Davis. Walter is fantastic because he’s like the librarian. He knew Elmore, and he’d loved Justified, and he can recall stuff that my partner in crime and co-writer Dave Andron and I had long forgotten. It was just a great situation.

In addition to the allure of getting the band back together, what did you feel you hadn’t said in the original series of Justified? What themes and character developments did you want to revisit?

I actually think there is an existential story of Raylan’s life here. The first act, which we told in Justified’s original run, is about how you can’t go home again. In Justified: City Primeval, we pick him up 10 or so years later in Florida, and he’s about three or four years away from mandatory retirement from the U.S. Marshal Service. His daughter Willa is 15, and will be emancipated in a couple of years. He’s in the predicament of never having really been the father to his daughter, which is a major thread of this part of the story.

Willa is a product of divorce, and he sees her twice a month, so he’s Mr. Good-time Charlie. He thinks he’s a better father than he really is, and he realizes that along the way. It’s not just that he’s near mandatory retirement, he’s a walking anachronism—the world’s changed a lot politically and sociologically. People are more aware of situations around law enforcement and race relations. That’s a theme we pulled in from westerns, the equivalent of the old gunslinger who all of a sudden sees cars all over dirt roads.

Raylan in 2023 is a whole different world than Raylan in 2010.

He’s in a different place than he was in the original series’ pilot, where Winona tells him he’s the angriest man she’s ever met. Back then, he’s not aware enough to get it. Justified: City Primeval is the next step. This is, in a way, like the chapter before the opening of Unforgiven, where Clint Eastwood starts out in pig shit and has to strap the gun back on. It’s a potent and deeply personal story about when you see that the road in front of you is a lot shorter than the road behind, and you only have so much time left.

I rewatched the pilot yesterday, and was struck by how badly Raylan needs Winona to explain to him how furious he is. He makes such specific choices in his violence—shooting to kill the guy in Miami, deliberately sparing Boyd’s life—but can just barely connect them to the feelings that prompted those choices. It’s only after the fact that he can even start to see it.

He’s such an Elmore character. They don’t make huge leaps; they move incrementally, and I think that’s what happens in the new series. He gave up the ghost of his past in the first series. He’s moving another couple inches forward now, and there’s a third chapter.

There’s something powerful about his relationship with his daughter. There’s interesting stuff going on with women, generally. Raylan’s been married. We’ve seen him with other women before, but Carolyn is so smart. She’s formidable, and is not going to take any shit from him. She’s such a fascinating character. Here’s the great thing: Everybody’s working an angle in this world. Everybody’s gray, you know?

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You touched on race earlier, and in the years since the conclusion of the original series, many viewers’ perspectives on law enforcement have shifted towards a certain skepticism. It sounds like you approached the series with a very keen understanding of that. Where do you think Raylan is in his thinking about race?

I think Raylan is aware of how the world works, and I think he judges people on who they are. He’s a straight shooter. But I do think there is part of the story that is plainly about race, and what it means to be Black and to be white in the world right now. We maneuver him and Carolyn together in such a way that they have moments where they can come clean with each other. And I think it’s pretty honest. I talked to a couple of Black writers who are talking about this show, who love that aspect of the show and found it very real. And I felt like, wow, then we accomplished it without putting a flag on it. We wanted to make sure that it just felt honest and organic, and I think we did that.

I don’t know that the world itself is that different, but our eyes are a little wider than they were eight years ago, you know? I think Raylan is aware of that, and knows that he’s kind of a dinosaur. The world’s changed, and he is who he is. But he’s making these little incremental movements.

He seems more willing to listen now. Maybe part of that is being the fish out of water in an unfamiliar city.

Yeah, there’s no safety net, and nothing to hold on to.

Let’s talk a bit about how Raylan is subject to the specifics of Detroit and the players he meets. It goes to something at the heart of mystery and crime stories, how they run on coincidences of people and places.

A distinctive theme in American crime fiction, when it’s working well, is cosmic forces maneuvering people together. Elmore was called the Dickens of Detroit, weaving this fabric of all these people that run into each other. It’s a big town and a small town at the same time, so this is a story about people’s lives intersecting.

So the story is a three-hander between Mansell, Carolyn, and Raylan, where forces are maneuvering them all together, and at least one of them will not be standing at the end. It’s about the collision course they’re on. But Elmore would write characters who would appear for maybe two pages in one book, and they’d seem inconsequential, and then they’re the main characters in the next novel. Little things we set up in the first couple of episodes, they matter. Raylan meeting the judge at the courthouse, it matters! Still, we didn’t want to let the audience get too far ahead of the characters in the storytelling.

The one place where the audience does get ahead is understanding that the murder of the judge and his clerk is not a political conspiracy. We see that it’s just a straightforward double murder by a guy who’s mad that he’s been inconvenienced.

Right. And he enjoys it.

It’s so interesting that Raylan is still dealing with this type of villain, who he tussled with constantly in the original series. Mansell is kind of a horrifying fun-house mirror version of Raylan, a guy with limited impulse control, and who’s largely unaware of his own shortcomings.

I think Mansell is different from the other guys. He’s a nihilist who kills out of anger, and for fun. With Boyd, he and Raylan dug coal together, so they had some common ground and understood each other. Raylan doesn’t understand this guy at all, and that’s a little scary. It makes him formidable. And Raylan may have lost a step and a half in there, too.

(This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.)

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