You’ll never leave Harlan alive, says the song, but Raylan Givens managed it. The Stetson-wearing deputy, protagonist of the inexcusably overlooked crime drama Justified, made it out after six seasons of chasing outlaws through eastern Kentucky’s hills and hollers. A decade later, the hat is back. Good news: it still fits.
If you haven’t watched Justified, then you haven’t seen Timothy Olyphant in the role he was born for. First appearing in a series of Elmore Leonard novellas, Givens is the “cowboy marshal” whose Old West approach at today’s US marshals service gets him into as much trouble as his quick-draw artistry gets him out of. His long-awaited return adapts Leonard’s 1980 story, City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit, across an eight-part series that’s part continuation, part offshoot.
Givens’s Appalachian roots were crucial to Justified’s dramatic universe, and transplanting the Harlan County native to a city with one of the largest Black populations in the US is a bold move. A white officer of the law with a history of sanctioned shootings might be a controversial choice of hero in today’s America. But Givens’s appeal has always been as much about his fair play as his gunplay and this chance mission to Michigan, while attempting to reconnect with his teenage daughter, exposes a murky and corrupt justice system.
We encounter Givens on a soon-aborted road trip, as he disarms a pair of carjackers in characteristically carefree fashion, then pays the price in court. “You were going to put a black man in the trunk of your car?” asks defence lawyer Carolyn Wilder (Aunjanue Ellis), who emerges as the perfect foil for Givens. Before the marshal knows it he is embroiled in the death of a judge, and his daughter Willa is being menaced by an itinerant sociopath who makes for a nastier villain than he has ever encountered.
Olyphant has experience of reprising a great role a decade on. For Deadwood: the Movie he returned to his other signature lawman, Sheriff Seth Bullock, 13 years after the gritty TV western was cut off in its prime. Here as there, the actor and character have matured with perfect synchronicity, and Olyphant inhabits a grey-haired and slightly mellower Givens who is realising that there may be more to life than chasing down bad guys. The on-screen blend of tenderness and teenage friction with Willa is no accident either: she is played by his real-life daughter, Vivian.
Scripted by Dave Andron and Michael Dinner, two Justified writers, it retains the original’s noir-ish sensibility and sly dialogue, even if the pithy putdowns don’t have the hit-rate of the original (“Me and dead owls don’t give a hoot”, “I’ve shot people I like more for less”). If any measure of justice is to be rendered by this TV comeback it should include a new appreciation for Graham Yost, the showrunner who first parlayed Leonard’s short story Fire in the Hole into a thrilling and long-running crime drama.
Better known in the UK for spy drama Slow Horses and recent dystopian sci-fi Silo, Yost, who is an executive producer on City Primeval, deserved far more recognition for Justified than it received outside the US. Olyphant’s performance also went woefully under noticed, and the show was unlucky to have aired during a golden age for US television, regularly overshadowed by Mad Men and Breaking Bad in awards season.
For years it has been one of the best-made, least-known programmes ever to wallow on Prime. Series one began in the fashion of a generic cop drama, each episode presenting a self-contained problem for the cowboy marshal to sort out (usually by pulling his piece faster than the other guy). But it quickly eschewed the weekly case for more complex series arcs, becoming an intricate portrait of hardscrabble mountain lives where humour and violence, squalor and pride exist side by side.
Each season introduced a new nemesis for Raylan, be it a drug cartel hitman or a murderous matriarch. But at its core remained the fizzing chemistry between Olyphant’s Givens and Walton Goggins’s would-be kingpin Boyd Crowder: two men who once dug coal together, now on opposite sides of the law. The quality of ensemble acting made every relationship in its community bristle with drama, from Joelle Carter’s Ava – Raylan and Boyd’s mutual love interest – to Raymond J Barry as Givens’s petty criminal father.
There’s no place for the return of any beloved Kentucky characters in Justified: City Primeval, but there is talk of one more outing for Olyphant’s deputy marshal in the future. And with Disney+ streaming the complete back catalogue alongside the new series, there is no better time to pour a bourbon and give it a go. It will be everything you hoped for, right down to the hat.
Justified: City Primeval is available on Disney+ from 6 September.
