Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Justified: City Primeval’ On FX and Hulu, Where Raylan Givens Finds Himself Chasing Down A Killer In Detroit

In this era of networks and streaming services squeezing as much juice out of their intellectual property as they can, it’s rare when a spinoff series approaches the quality of the original. But when you have Timothy Olyphant returning as Raylan Givens and an Elmore Leonard novel as your source material, the chances of the result being good is pretty high.

JUSTIFIED: CITY PRIMEVAL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: “THE EVERGLADES.” Willa Givens (Vivian Olyphant) looks at a swamp while her father, Deputy U.S. Marshal Rayland Givens (Timothy Olyphant) pays for lunch. He gives her an ice cream cone, and she asks if she can eat it before they get in the car.

The Gist: Raylan and Willa are on a highway in Florida because he’s taking her to a “camp” that she calls “conversion therapy.” Apparently she punched another girl and her mother decided the camp would be good for her. Right when she asks her dad if she can stay with him, they get rammed from behind by a pickup truck.

The two guys in the car are looking to rob them and threaten to do lord-knows-what to Willa. That’s when Rayland pulls out a shotgun, shoots out a tire and shows his badge.

Meanwhile, outside of Detroit, a man rolls up to a gas station in a vintage car, sees another vintage car with a tape deck inside and a dead buck strapped to the back, and steals the car (without the dead buck). He puts the cassette in and rocks out to “Seven Nation Army.”

In Detroit, Judge Alvin Guy (Keith David) almost gets killed when his brand new Cadillac blows up. He’s presiding over the arraignment of one of the men that Raylan encountered in Florida; it turns out that when he called the guy in, he had outstanding warrants in Detroit. His defense attorney, Carolyn Wilder (Aunjanue Ellis) puts Rayland on the stand and questions his treatment of her client, and both Raylan and Willa run afoul of Judge Guy, landing them in a holding cell.

Raylan is about to road trip back to Florida with his daughter when his boss tells him he’s been requested by Judge Guy to help find the guy who tried to kill him. “I guess it takes an angry white man to find another angry white man,” says DPD detective Wendell Robinson (Victor Williams). In a rural Michigan hideout the next day, Norbert (Norbert Leo Butz), Raylan’s DPD co-lead, brags that he got a militia guy to give up the location of their suspect in “like, six seconds.” Raylan also meets another DPD detective, Maureen Downey (Marin Ireland). They get one of the perps, after a chase involving motorbikes and a K9 officer that Norbert calls “a German Shepherd on steroids.” The guy says his partner has a very personal reason why he blew up the judge’s car: The judge slept with his mother.

Meanwhile, the dude rocking out to “Seven Nation Army,” Clement Mansell (Boyd Holbrook), goes to a Detroit casino and finds his old squeeze, cocktail waitress Sandy Stanton (Adelaide Clemens). They plan to rob an Albanian high roller, but first Clement needs to retrieve something from the bar owned by Sweetie (Vondie Curtis-Hall), an old associate. Sweetie’s bar also happens to be a hangout for Carolyn, who meets her ex-husband/law partner, who seems to need some money.

Raylan and the DPD task force find the guy who blew up the judge’s car, but a chance encounter between the judge, his assistant/girlfriend, and Clement Mansell means that Raylan is going to be in Detroit for a whole lot longer than he ever expected.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Justified: City Primeval is supposed to take place about 15 years after the events of the original 2010-15 series Justified, which was created by Graham Yost based on Elmore Leonard’s stories and novels featuring Givens. This time around, Dave Andron and Michael Dinner are the creative forces behind this new series, inserting Givens into Leonard’s novel City Primeval: High Noon In Detroit. (And you know we couldn’t mention the intersection of Elmore Leonard source material and the Motor City without mentioning Steven Soderbergh’s 1998 masterpiece Out Of Sight.)

Our Take: Like the original series, Justified: City Primeval has a fair amount of lightness and wit, much of it stemming from Olyphant’s take on Raylan Givens. He slips right back into the role he filled so well for six seasons, and Andron and Dinner have done a good job of grafting Givens into Leonard’s City Primeval story, putting him in the position of pursuing Mansell, as psychotic as any opponent he’s faced, but also giving the show a bit of a “cowboy cop in the city” vibe.

What City Primeval manages to accomplish is pretty rare. It’s completely accessible to viewers who never saw a second of Justified, because Raylan — and to a much lesser extent, Willa — is the only carryover between the series, but it’s also going to feel familiar and comfortable to the original series’ fans. Again, the continuity of Olyphant as Raylan helps, but no Elmore Leonard story is just about one character; it involves a panoply of characters that are either completely evil or are good people who are ethically compromised.

What we’re looking forward to seeing is how Raylan and Carolyn interact; their first encounter is during that arraignment, but then Willa sends “the dumbest drink on the menu” to her on his behalf when they’re at the same bar. There is certainly an attraction, but they’re going to be on opposite sides of this story, as she and Mansell go way back via their mutual friend Sweetie. The cops that work with Raylan are going to be on the spectrum of complete mistrust, like Norbert looks like he’s going to be, and someone like Maureen, who just wants justice done.

One of the other things we find intriguing is that the circumstances of how Raylan ends up staying in Detroit has the judge and Mansell intersecting in an ingenious way. How will Raylan and his DPD colleagues get to the point where they figure out Mansell is involved? And just how will Mansell be able to avoid getting caught? All of it makes us want to watch more, which is all you can ask for of any series, much less a sequel to one of the best series of the 2010s.

Sex and Skin: We see some sex between Mansell and Sandy, and some of Mansell’s bare tush.

Parting Shot: After seeing the bodies, Raylan goes back to his hotel room, sees a sleeping Willa in her rollaway bed, and looks at her with concern.

Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to Vivian Olyphant, because the real-life father-daughter chemistry she has with Timothy Olyphant comes across onscreen in Willa’s scenes with Raylan.

Most Pilot-y Line: Norbert seems to have a signature line, in some form of, “That’s how we do things in Detroit.” Didn’t realize that being a douchebag cop was just a Detroit thing.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Justified: City Primeval will satisfy both fans of the original series and people who are just looking for a well-written, sometimes-funny cop drama to watch.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.