Justified: City Primeval turned Justified’s dark humor into plain old darkness
The original run of Justified opens with Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens blowing away a gunrunner at a swanky Miami rooftop pool after goading him into drawing first. When an internal affairs investigation opens up around his actions and Raylan is forced to return to Kentucky, Timothy Olyphant gets to perfect his comic timing, assuring anyone around the office who asks him that the shooting was, in fact, justified.
Justified: City Primeval, on the other hand, flips the script: as Deputy Givens is driving his troubled daughter Willa to a discipline-oriented summer camp, their car is rear-ended and father and daughter alike are approached by two men with a revolver. He gets the best of these small fries, of course, but something’s immediately different: Raylan — and his daughter — are in a type of palpable danger that never existed in the original series. The tone shift from “playful cowboy breaks the rules and always gets his man” to “concerned father aggressively pulls a shotgun from his trunk” is stark. We do get a bit of the ol’ Raylan razzle-dazzle shortly after in a courtroom as he tries to explain to a Detroit judge why he locked the two fugitives in a hot car while he and his daughter ate lunch, but that scene (and Keith David as Judge Alvin Guy) make it clear that the Givens charm is powerless in this new environment. It’s a heel turn for the show: City Primeval isn’t here to joke around.
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When Justified debuted in 2010, Olyphant had already anchored three seasons of Deadwood, which still exists as one of the most literary prestige television dramas 17 years after it was canceled. Instead of mirroring that show’s construction with extended dialogue-free sequences to show a character’s moral dubiousness
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