Justified: City Primeval Review - IGN (2024)

There’s always been something old-fashioned about Justified’s Raylan Givens, be it the cowboy accouterments he comes by so naturally or the sh*t-kicking sincerity with which Timothy Olyphant plays the deputy U.S. Marshal. His methods and his code marked him as an anomaly throughout creator Graham Yost’s six-season FX series, which remixed two novels and a short story by Elmore Leonard into something a little bit retro, and a little bit contemporary: A noir-tinged Western for the age of the prestige drama. One of the charms of the new limited series Justified: City Primeval is how it connects Raylan to a primetime tradition shared by Columbo, Jessica Fletcher, and original-formula Perry Mason: Like the TV movies that extended those characters’ crime-solving exploits, City Primeval clips the badge back to Olyphant’s belt for a brand new case – despite his last having been as good an ending as any basic-cable character can hope for.

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.

From the jump, it’s a story of wrong place(s), wrong time(s): While Raylan is escorting his teenage daughter Willa (played with dispiriting flatness by real-life Olyphant offspring Vivian) across Florida to a camp for unruly youth – a scene that initially comes off like the Marshal bringing in a fugitive – they become the targets of an attempted carjacking by drug dealers from up north. One amusing courtroom grilling from defense attorney Carolyn Wilder (Aunjanue Ellis) and some famous last words (“you’ll be out of here in 24 hours”) later, the Givens family road trip is forced into an extended pit stop – right in time for the intriguing arrival of a successfully boosted vehicle blaring a “Seven Nation Army” cover from its tape deck. The coincidences pile up quickly – with a high-profile murder investigation, wild goose chases for multiple smoking guns, and the inevitable encroachment of organized crime still to come – but trouble and chaos have always had a way of finding Raylan, and City Primeval ties up its disparate threads with the flair of his literary creator.

The driver of that stolen ride presents City Primeval with its biggest challenge: What does a series with a rogues’ gallery as deep and colorful as Justified’s do for an encore? And what chance does that encore stand when the actor playing Clement “The Oklahoma Wildman” Mansell shares a first name with the greatest of all Raylan’s adversaries, Boyd Crowder? Boyd Holbrook heeds this call with a chilling intensity, playing Clem as a captivating force of nature whose knack for getting away with his crimes presents a grim reflection of Raylan’s own Teflon-like relationship with accountability. Clem is made all the more memorable in the way he’s written, his pathological behavior leavened by a yearning to be a rock star of the dirt-and-grit variety. This facet of the character’s personality leads to some sweaty allusions to hometown heroes The White Stripes, but it also supplies a wealth of vulnerability Holbrook mines between outbursts of violence and menace.

Showrunners and Justified veterans Dave Andron and Michael Dinner construct a version of Detroit that Leonard would recognize by spirit if not necessarily by sight. (Various landmarks and a stray bottle of Jeppson’s Malört make it painfully obvious City Primeval was shot 300 miles down I-94, in Chicago.) Dialogue nods toward a city ravaged by the decline of the auto industry and roiled by racism, full of people with thick skin and outsized pride in local musical exports – a sense of place that can encapsulate any number of American myths. Raylan brings a whiff of the Wild West with him, but a lot of it is already there before he arrives: in the click of Clem’s boots; the modern-day gambling hall where his moll, Sandy (Adelaide Clemens), scams high rollers; or the heels being cooled in the town saloon run by retired session man (or “hired gun,” if you prefer) Marcus “Sweety” Sweeton (Vondie Curtis-Hall).

An ecosystem of endlessly watchable personalities springs from this relatively small ensemble, portrayed with finesse and charisma by the seasoned likes of Ellis, Curtis-Hall, Clemens, Norbert Leo Butz, Marin Ireland, and Victor Williams. City Primeval does a remarkably efficient job of establishing Raylan’s new allies and antagonists – you can hear a whole relationship in one exchange of buddy-cop banter between Butz and Williams. There’s an economy of storytelling on display that doesn’t waste time on side characters: Carolyn’s ex, Jamal (Amin Joseph, oozing smarm), is around for some exposition in the premiere, but doesn’t return until he’s absolutely essential to her arc. It can be a bit ruthless in that regard, though: Vivian Olyphant is outmatched by her co-stars, and despite the stakes she lends early episodes and a killer visual gag she sets up by ordering “the dumbest drink on the menu,” City Primeval winds up sending Willa down a cul-de-sac.

There may be a few too many shortcuts taken, considering the amount of epilogue in the finale and a love story that fires up before the spark is seemingly lit. Still, the heat generated by the latter is undeniable, and it’s one of the broader demonstrations of the characters’ instincts and impulses colliding with what they want and what they’re willing to do to get it – for an example with a lighter touch, see the sequence where Carolyn enters an empty courtroom to take a seat behind the bench. (Ellis is phenomenal in her body language – she takes a pause in episode 5 that’s simply stunning.) There’s also this line, from a crime boss played by Terry Kinney, which offers an epigram for City Primeval or Justified as a whole: “Justice requires more than the law is willing or able to provide.”

Age eventually enters into the equation, and Clem finds an early path under Raylan’s skin by needling the Marshal for being out on the street at this stage of his career, rather than sitting behind a desk. He’s marked as a relic by factors beyond the gray hairs now sprouting from Timothy Olyphant’s chin and the man-out-of-time qualities that have been with the character from the start: Onscreen depictions of law enforcement are under a greater deal of scrutiny than they were when Justified went off the air in 2015. Throughout City Primeval, there’s the acknowledgement that it’s not as fun to watch Raylan take aim at a bad guy as it used to be – and reminders that, in hindsight, maybe it should’ve never been that fun in the first place. But Justified, and Raylan, are better equipped than most to handle such quandaries. Contradiction and internal conflict have always been a part of the character, and they still fit him like a pair of bootcut jeans.