Along with millions of other Justified fans longing for the TV return of Timothy Olyphant’s Raylan Givens, I jumped for joy when FX ordered up a new season in the form of Justified: City Primeval. The excitement was so palpable that nothing could tamp it down, not even the fact that the story ports the U.S. Marshal into a completely different adventure that won’t lean into tons of cameos and general fan service. (To note: Raylan Givens doesn’t factor into the Elmore Leonard source material.) The show has now arrived, and while I miss everything happening down in Kentucky, the changes made are successful ones, particularly the fact that Raylan doesn’t get to be quite the badass he was in Harlan County.
I know, I know. That goes completely against all expectations, logic, and TV mechanics. We’re supposed to want our heroes to keep striving towards perfection in deep strides, but Justified: City Primeval is a great exception to that traditional notion. It’s like replaying a video game you’ve beaten before, basically serving as a universe reset for Raylan, who is somewhat forced into investigating a case in Detroit while on a road trip with his daughter Willa (played by the actor's real-life daughter Vivan Olyphant). He’s got all the baggage and memories from pre-Detroit, but without being able to instantly rely on the strengths that make him stand out on his home turf, and that works on both a professional and a personal level.
Raylan's Badge And Rep Don't Mean Much In Detroit
From the earliest minutes of the pilot episode, Justified asked viewers to take Raylan's side over a confrontation where he may or may not have been justified in using his weapon, and that same balance between authority and light vigilantism is what a lot of the show's drama was built on top of. In the same way that Walton Goggins' Boyd Crowder would sometimes pull off ostensibly virtuous acts amidst his criminal undertakings, Raylan has always been willing to push the line of the law if it served the greater good, or at least his understanding of such things. But as he soon finds out after being partnered up with Victor Williams' subdued Wendell Robinson and meeting up with Norbert Leo Butz's aggro-cop Norbert Bryl, he's no longer the big fish in the pond.
Which is certainly an aggravation that gets a down-vote from Raylan himself, but as a viewer who loves watching the character use his brain as much as his brawn and weaponry, it's more engaging than I would have expected to watch Olyphant realizing just how limited his options are when it comes to utilizing his skillsets. He's used to getting slaps on the wrist from trusted supervisors, but there are no guaranteed outcomes when he crosses boundaries so far away from his current official digs in Miami. His U.S. Marshal badge obviously still has weight, but not as much as he'd like.
Being boxed in is bad enough just on a day-to-day level, but it's when the season's core antagonist Clement Mansel (Boyd Holbrook) figures out Raylan's limitations that it becomes all but impossible for Raylan to quickly rise up as an intimidating force to gain the upper hand. For someone who knows intimately well how important it is to keep one's enemies close and understandable, an impulsive monster like Mansel is but another problem to figure out. And few have better "intensely figuring shit out" faces than Timothy Olyphant.
Raylan's Family Responsibilities Also Make Everything Complicated
Back in the Harlan County years, most of Raylan's prized possessions were items worn on his person, from his hats to his sidearms. But in Justified: City Primeval, Raylan is a proud, if harried, father of a daughter named Willa who clearly did not fall far from the rapscallion tree. Though she's not a constant presence with him while he's on the job, which could have been a TV crime in and of itself, she is a young girl in a strange town where dangerous men increasingly want to hurt her father. And as any parent out there can easily understand, Raylan feels even more out of his element when it comes to having to protect his offspring in the midst of all of these other unknowns.
So even if there weren't lots of official overhead hanging over his hat and guiding his actions, Raylan is also kneecapped in many ways due to Willa's presence. Not only does he have to worry about basic safety, but also about how to keep her fed and occupied while he's being called out to investigate things. And the fact that she's around also puts a clamp on what he'd be willing to do during such investigations. He can't skirt the law too hard, lest he commit a felony even he's unable to talk his way out of, which would presumably put Willa going back to Miami, although her life away from Raylan hasn't been fully laid out ahead of release.
As a pillar of justice with Harlan County as his stomping grounds, Raylan Givens was a force to be reckoned with for any and all crime families, and one that wasn't tethered to anything he couldn't walk away from. (I mean, we all want to be tethered to Natalie Zea's Winona Hawkins.) But in taking him away from familiar surroundings and giving him the most important responsibility one can have, Justified: City Primeval successfully evolved Raylan without destroying anything that made him great to begin with. Except for maybe the idea that nobody else in Detroit knows yet to set Raylan up for A+ retorts and rebuttals, but hopefully that'll happen by the end of the season.
Justified: City Primeval debuts its first two episodes on FX on Tuesday, July 18, at 10:00 p.m. ET, with episodes available to stream the next day with a Hulu subscription. Head to our 2023 TV schedule to see what other new and returning shows are popping up in the near future.
