Spoilers abound. This requires some familiarity with both shows.
There are by now two sequences of the neo-western Justified: the first, set in Eastern Kentucky, ran from 2010 to 2015 and is widely (and correctly) considered one of the best shows of the 2010s. The second, Justified: City Primeval, relocates its protagonist Raylon Givens (Timothy Olyphant) to Detroit. This limited eight episode series began in July 2023 and ended two months later with a disappointing season finale that neither brought the story to an end nor offered the possibility of anything new happening to its characters: all it waved was the tantalising idea that there might, someday, be another season. In this, City Primeval exposes a fundamental problem that plagues so much of television, especially today: the temptation to carry on a series for as long as possible, whether or not there’s still a story to be told.
Despite all that makes it worthwhile, this new iteration falters because it turns away from what gave Justified its compelling premise: the idea that evil doesn’t reside in the baddies but is everywhere and in everyone. In City Primeval, evil is domesticated and that, ultimately, is what makes it lag so far behind Justified.
In its last episode, we see the return of characters old and new: from the original Justified and with very little, ah, justification, Boyd Crowder (Walter Goggins), Raylan’s nemesis of sorts, comes roaring back, his incandescent smile having won over a prison guard with whom he escapes off into the hills. Raylan’s wife Winona (Natalie Zea) re-emerges to drop off his daughter Willa (who had appeared in the first three episodes, and played by Vivian Olyphant), to spend time with her dad as he prepares for retirement. Father and daughter take off in a boat for some bonding time, but the phone rings, clearly with news about Boyd—and we see that Raylan is at least for now reluctant to get back into the hunt.
City Primeval offers the possibility that we’ll see a return to that old relationship between Boyd and Raylan, one that sustained all of Justified as the two men battled each other in the hills of Kentucky. But, despite what its producers (and perhaps many viewers) might think or want, it’s not a particularly interesting possibility. What Justified offered was the idea that villainy is not a clear concept: every season had its villain, sure, but his or her evil was never in stark contrast to some other, better people. In Justified, the whole world was against everyone in Harlan County or, as Boyd says to Raylan, “the only way to get out of our town alive is to never have been born there.” It’s a testament to the quality of the writing in Justified that it remains an insanely hilarious show, given the world it paints so vividly.
City Primeval takes Raylan out of Kentucky and gives him a new and monstrous villain, the psychotic Clement Mansell (played with steely assurance by Boyd Holbrook). Clement looks like he could be a GQ model playing a villain playing a GQ model playing a villain: he occupies that razor’s edge between crazy hot and batshit crazy. This magnetic edginess is partly what draws his girlfriend Sandy (Adelaide Clemens) to him and it’s what makes his presence both terrifying and all-absorbing. Of course, at the end, Raylan gets his man: Clement is shot while reaching for a cassette tape of his singing, which Raylan mistakes as a reach for a gun (what was his bigger crime, the question seems to be: those songs or his maniacal murdering spree across states?). By this point, we’ve run the gamut of villains and seen a McGuffin: corrupt cops and judges, an Albanian cartel, all of them obsessed with finding a notebook that’s a record of corruption (the show’s homage to the analogue world is a delight).
City Primeval’s insertion of Raylan into a setting that’s vastly different from Kentucky makes it an interesting watch. It makes race part of the story without that stagnant Diversity, Equity, Inclusion approach that plagues an industry that still has no idea what to do with non-white characters (witness, for instance, And Just Like That). In City Primeval, Black characters are not there to Teach and Preach so that the white people around them might mutely nod in understanding before going on to be the same old clueless racists. Detective Wendell Robinson (Victor Williams) is a man with his own internal life and his world-weariness isn’t pedagogical and tuned into Raylan, with whom he goes on stakeouts, but a reflection of what he’s seen of all the deeply corrupt structures in and around his job. Carolyn Wilder (Aunjanue Ellis) is equal parts conflicted and determined as she moves back and forth between corruption and integrity in her job as a defence attorney who’s forced to take on Clement as a client. Characteristically, of course, Raylan sleeps with Carolyn—the erotic charge between them is one of the sexiest on television in recent years, even as it burns with the sheer unprofessionalism of it all.
Based on the works of Elmore Leonard and specifically his short story, “Fire in the Hole,” Justified follows the life and travails and occasional triumphs of Raylan Givens, a U.S. Deputy Marshal (a cross between a local cop and the FBI). Givens, played brilliantly by Olyphant, is an excellent shot, has a droll manner and very little sense of what we might call boundaries, or a sense of scale. In episode one, we see him stationed in Miami, shooting cartel businessman Tommy Bucks—out in the open, at a luxury hotel. It’s not a great look for law enforcement. Raylan thinks the shooting is justified because, cartel and all that, but his superiors don’t agree and he’s shipped off to the Eastern District of Kentucky, which includes Harlan County.
The forced move feels deeply punitive to Raylan, and not just because he has to leave Miami for an economically depressed area with nary a cappuccino in sight: Harlan County is his birthplace, one that he escaped as a teenager in a bid to leave a world and family behind. When he left, he had been fated, like generations before him, to spend the rest of his life first trying to eke out a dangerous living in mine country and then, as the area was ground down by economic degradation, to try to survive in the chaotic world of meth and weed production (just as the possibility of legal weeds raises its head and the hopes of the inhabitants of the area). It’s only because his aunt Helen (Linda Gehringer), now also his stepmother, gave him money to escape that he was able to get to college and beyond. The return to Kentucky means reviving old entanglements.
But in a place as fraught and perilous as Harlan County, friendships and filial connections are hard to maintain and loyalty is a meaningless concept. Raylan’s own father Arlo (Raymond J. Barry) betrays his son, repeatedly. Bdetrayal is a habit in this world. The tension between them runs so thick that we constantly expect a bloody act of patricide.
Raylan runs into an old friend who, over the course of six seasons, slowly becomes his arch nemesis, the whale to his Ahab: Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins) with whom he had once spent hours and days in the mine shafts when they were both teenagers, bonded by their experience of having narrowly escaped an explosion underground. Their meeting again, after years of separation, is almost mythological, so embedded is it in a million befores and afters, histories and portends that bind the two to each other. Raylan left, Boyd remained. That simple fact grounds the underlying tension that runs through Justified: who gets to leave Eastern Kentucky, with its economy slowly sinking into the ground, tipping into empty and abandoned mines while its prehistoric mountaintops are sliced by developers? Who is compelled to stay, and why? Who is forced to return to a life once seen in the rear-view mirror, a scene that ought to have mercifully faded from view?
Both men’s families have been in Harlan for generations and bristle with men and women who are, perforce, of the criminal persuasion, as Boyd might put it in his fulsome, elaborate way. The sexual entanglements in this show are as complicated as a spider’s web, or Fire Island in the summer: it’s best to assume that everyone will sleep with everyone else. Raylan leads with his dick and has little integrity, and his lovers include Ava (Joelle Carter), who happens to be Boyd’s sister-in-law. Ava is married to Bowman (unseen), who beats his wife so badly and so often that she finally shoots him to death. Eventually, after Raylan and Ava have had their fling, she hooks up with Boyd, in a tempestuous affair that ends up with her literally escaping, pregnant with their son. At some point, Raylan also hooks up with his ex-wife, who had left him for their real estate agent (conveniently disposed of as part of a gang bust).
It’s to the credit of Justified that it doesn’t portray any of this in a mocking look-at-these-inbred-hillbillies way. Instead, it takes seriously the contexts in which these fraught relationships are formed and end, and it explores, without pedantry, the physical and economic violence that undergirds all of them. For a while, it seems like Ava and Boyd are a forever honeymoon couple (her murder of his sibling notwithstanding) and Boyd is a flowery and romantic lover, sometimes putting everything on the line to save her. And, yet, at the end, we see that, even towards her, he can only reign in his brutality for so long. Winona moves from one man to the other, leaving a husband for another and then another: in this world, an unmarried woman is vulnerable and apt to head towards low-paid waitressing or the local whorehouse and marriage will at least guarantee a literal roof over the head. Everyone steals, connives, betrays, and keeps trying to escape.
All these interpersonal relationships play out against the background of villainy and the ubiquitous swastikas and Confederate flags splashed so casually across the walls of domiciles everywhere. Each season of Justified teases out an encounter with an individual villain. In season two, it’s Maggie (Mags) Bennett (Margo Martindale), who always has one glass lined with a homemade deadly poison. In it, she helpfully pours out a shot of her moonshine, also homemade: death is quick but utterly agonising. And then there’s Avery Markham in the sixth season, played by Sam Elliott, sans his famous moustache.
The disappearance of the world’s most famous ’stache is worth a brief pause and rumination because, please, this is the One Moustache to Rule Them All: In Grace and Frankie, Grace (Jane Fonda) shows Sol (Sam Waterson) a picture of Elliott, who plays her long-ago love and his response is, “There’s about ten people in the world who can carry off that moustache. And he’s nine of them.” And yet here is Elliott, without the familiar Yosemite Sam-ish appendage and it’s…distracting. It turns out that he has an extraordinarily thin lip, one that’s almost non-existent, and we can only assume that the poor thing had, over decades, become used to simply curling up and sleeping under the warmth and cover of the moustache. Suddenly, in Justified, there it is, exposed for all the world to see. This begs the question: how much of Sam Elliott’s performance—often the same one, really, even if usually a riveting one—depends on that moustache?
But we digress.
Elliott’s Markham is the last villain in Justified, appearing in the sixth and final season. One of his nemeses turns out to be a slip of a girl, Loretta McCready (Kaitlyn Dever), but going into the intricacies of that relationship—and in Justified even antagonistic standoffs are based in relationships of one kind or the other—is beyond the scope of this essay because it goes back through the entire series. Suffice it to say that no one in Justified is either a saint or a sinner but also, that everyone in the show is, in one way or the other, rotten in some part of their core. All antagonisms are ancient ones.
City Primeval returns to Raylan fifteen years later, his teen daugher Willa in tow. There has been much discussion about both the artistic licence taken in this acceleration of Willa’s age (by the logic of Justified, she should be only nine years old), and the casting of Olyphant’s daughter Vivian in the role.
About the former: City Primeval is already an act of artistic licence since Raylan doesn’t appear in the novel on which it’s based, Leonard’s City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit. As to the latter: despite the Olyphants’ hemming and hawing about the matter, it’s very clearly an act of nepotism. Putting that aside, the bigger problem with Willa in this iteration is not that she should have remained nine but that she holds up the story and is part of the domestication of evil that’s a problem with the show.
The internet blazed with irritation upon Willa’s first appearance and much of the discourse around her focused on what many denounced as an awful performance by Vivian Olyphant—who is in fact much older than the character she plays, giving us the oddity of a twenty-year-old playing a fifteen-year-old who should have been a nine-year-old.
It’s true: Willa is, first and foremost, deeply, deeply annoying. It doesn’t help that Olyphant plays her with a breathy, little girl voice that makes child-bearing women resolve to never give birth and is incongruous with someone who clearly looks like a woman squeezed into a teen’s clothes. Willa is annoying in the way that most teens are annoying, but she’s also annoying because she’s so clearly written in as a humanising foil to Raylan. In film and television, we often see the character widely recognised as the Magical Negro: a Black person whose sole job it is to provide moral guideposts and wisdom to white people. Less recognised is the Magical Teen, a slyly wise not-quite-adult whose job it is to be uncannily perceptive and show the adults where they’re going wrong. In one scene, Willa tries to set Carolyn up with her dad (ah, so perceptive, so prescient) and tells her, “He’s not bad for a white guy” (so funny, so savvy about race relations). In another, she walks through the streets of Detroit, dressed in the kind of outfit that screams, “I’m in Detroit and this will help me pass in the ’hood) and somehow bests a watch hustler selling fake Rolexes into selling her one for $7, and returns, unharmed, to the hotel where they’re staying.
Things almost end badly when Clement is able to lure her outside the room by pretending to be her father’s co-worker and Raylan finds the two of them in the restaurant downstairs chatting over a meal, the villain’s arm almost around Willa. There’s a moment when she realises what’s really wrong and then her father takes Clement outside and beats him, an act witnessed by Willa who starts to cry.
Why, it’s not clear (horror at watching her father, who has been a Deputy Marshall all her life, engage in violence, is one possibility but a remote one), and by now the character is so pointless that it’s really hard to care about this teen who keeps forcing the story to a standstill while her dad has to step in once again to keep her from harm. And, of course, as she leaves him at the airport to finally, finally return to her mother, she lets him know that all her teenage rebellion has been an attempt to get his attention.
Well, then.
Nothing about Willa is particularly interesting and her storyline, such as it is, only exists to establish fake street cred for a character who is not germane to the larger plot and narrative. Willa seems more like an attempt to make Raylan seem more…what, exactly, it’s hard to tell. Her character may have been a result of the Olyphants wanting to get their kid into the movies, or an attempt to ground Raylan in a slight domestic drama because, perhaps, the show’s creators (Olyphant is an executive producer) felt it was somehow unseemly for a man nearing sixty to not have any visible filial affiliations. Or, perhaps, all of that. Whatever the intent, the result takes us back to the question of evil and to the last episode of City Primeval.
Clement is dead, Raylan has retired, and Willa, still a brat but now one with a driver’s permit, is dropped off by her mother. Boyd escapes from prison, and Raylan is faced with the possibility that he may well have to return to the chase, being the one most familiar with his old nemesis’s ways. Willa sits patiently by, waiting for him to open up about why he chose to retire. Again: none of this is particularly interesting and it feels like old and new characters are being tossed together in a bland and tasteless salad, offering the possibility of little more than another season. But by now, the story has dimmed, and there’s little to excite a viewer about the future. Given the ongoing writers’ strike, it’s unclear if City Primeval can or will return and if it does, can Raylan and Boyd give us much more than reminders of the smart dialogue that lit up Justified? Will Willa return, even older but still younger, to once again become the reason why her dad has to stop what he’s doing to make sure she hasn’t been spirited away by another villain?
Lost in all this is what made the original Justified such a pleasure to watch: the ferocious energy of evil that’s both internal to characters and the worlds and systems they have to inhabit. Justified lets evil roam unbounded, while City Primeval tries to domesticate it within a needless family drama and the possibility of the return of long-ago, stale antagonisms: all of which adds nothing and distracts utterly.
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