Welcome back to television, Raylan Givens. Given that it is in a hero's nature to return, and the medium's to encourage that when it seems profitable, the appearance of "Justified: City Primeval," this week on FX — eight years after Timothy Olyphant hung up his Stetson as the star of the original series, developed by Graham Yost from an Elmore Leonard short story — feels, if not inevitable … well, I'm going to say it: justified.
Raylan, a U.S. marshal, has been inserted here into the 1980 Leonard novel "City Primeval," whose main detective, Raymond Cruz (Paul Calderon), is compensated with a cameo. As we begin, Raylan, who spent the original series in the Appalachian Mountains of east Kentucky and has been working in Miami and living the life of a divorced dad in the interim, is driving his 15-year-old daughter, Willa — played by Olyphant's own talented daughter, Vivian Olyphant — to camp, much to her displeasure. (We last saw father and daughter eating ice cream, and ice cream is in the picture as we meet them again.)
But an encounter on the road with a couple of hooligans leads instead to a courtroom in Detroit, where Raylan gives testimony and Willa is chastised by tetchy Judge Alvin Guy (Keith David, sonorous as always) for laughing at cat videos on her phone. When that judge narrowly avoids assassination, Raylan is impressed into service by the Detroit PD, to his own and Willa's now doubled displeasure. (She's stuck in a Detroit hotel with orders from her father to stay put, but as a willful, bored teenager with no radar for danger, that isn't going to happen.)
