REVIEW: Justified: City Primeval [2023]

Rating: TV-MA | Episodes: 8 | Runtime: 60 minutes
Release Date: July 18th, 2023 (USA)
Studio: FX Network
Creator(s): Dave Andron & Michael Dinner

You have broken my heart … and also my leg.

After having just rewatched the entirety of “Justified’s” six seasons to prepare, I can say with certainty that “City Primeval” is the weakest chapter of the bunch. It’s not bad. I had a good time with it. It’s just tough to really dig in when Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) himself doesn’t belong. That was always the fun part of the show. Despite Givens being a US Marshall and the world of Harlan County being a cesspool of criminal activity, he still belonged. He knew those people. He understood those people. Here, in Detroit? He’s just another cop.

That’s why I hope the epilogue tease bears fruit because I’d love to see the character get one more adventure in Kentucky. Put him back in his element rather than surrounding him by corrupt residents in a corrupt city he’s simply not invested in. I always thought it was funny the way Graham Yost and company treated Detroit like it was an even more comical version of Gotham City than Gotham City, but Michael Dinner pretty much does the same here. Sure, it has some dramatic bite and cursory glimpses at history via music, but Clement Mansell (Boyd Holbrook) is as “Batman villain” as they come.

Again, though. He’s entertaining. You kind of want to see what will happen once he and Raylan go toe-to-toe, but it’s hard to really sell it since the latter seems to have one hand tied behind his back. First, it’s because his daughter is there (Vivian Olyphant’s Willa). Then it’s because he’s trying to protect potential romantic interest Carolyn Wilder (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor)—who’s caught in the middle as Mansell’s coerced lawyer in order to protect Sweetie (Vondie Curtis-Hall), his accomplice and her father figure. Add the most comical piece of the whole via a caricatured crew of Albanians waiting in the wings for violence and the show finds itself losing the plot to create ancillary melodrama that doesn’t quite earn merit.

There are a couple twists and turns to keep things interesting, but they don’t generally matter in the grand scheme beyond stretching out the episode order to eight. I liked what goes on with the cops (Marin Ireland, Victor Williams, and Norbert Leo Butz) because they are presented with enough gray to never truly know if they’re on the up-and-up. The race stuff seems super forced and almost as comical as the Albanians, but I guess I get it? Having Carolyn’s ex pretty much call Raylan a “honky” for five minutes straight is a weird choice, though. Maybe Dinner was trying to make up for the fact that the Detroit presence in the original show was all white (the Tonins).

So, while it’s an okay police procedural with a fantastic antagonist (Holbrook truly is the highlight here), it’s just a mediocre season of “Justified”. Cool to get another chapter of the Givens’ saga courtesy of another Elmore Leonard novel, but I’m realizing that the thing that made the original run so captivating was its setting of Harlan rather than Raylan himself. Go figure.