Dads around the world will be thrilled to know that Harlan County’s favourite trigger-happy lawman is finally back in action. Justified: City Primeval arrives in New Zealand when it hits Disney+ on July 19.
For six glorious seasons of Justified Timothy Olyphant played deputy US Marshall Raylan Givens, a straight shooter in every sense of the word, as he pursued his vendetta against old frenemy and Appalachian crime lord Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins). All this took place in the fictional Harlan County, Kentucky, Raylan’s childhood home, where he’d been relegated after shooting one too many bad guys on duty in Miami. It’s great TV, and a perfect distillation of the work of legendary crime writer Elmore Leonard (Get Shorty, Out of Sight), who originated the character in his novels.
Now, eight years after Raylan last hung up his guns, he returns in a brand-spankin-new eight-episode miniseries. Adapted from Elmore Leonard’s novel City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit (which is confusingly not a Raylan Givens story), the series sees our hero now back living in Miami and helping to raise his 14-year-old daughter, Willa, played by Olyphant’s real-life daughter Vivian.
But a quiet life is never on the cards for Raylan, and he soon finds himself heading off to Detroit in pursuit of psychopathic thrill-killer Clement Mansel, aka The Oklahoma Wildman, played by the reliably villainous Boyd Holbrook (Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Logan). Aunjanue Ellis, Adelaide Clemens, Vondie Curtis Hall, Marin Ireland, Norbert Leo Butz, Victor Williams, and Ravi Patel crop up as a variety of cops, criminals, and potential victims.
Justified was a pitch-perfect modern Western that earned both critical acclaim and a devoted fanbase, so expectations for this second go-round are pretty high. But there’s always a market for tough-talking, action-packed, meat ‘n’ potatoes crime thrillers, and given City Primeval’s pedigree, we’re definitely in safe hands here.
