The Big Picture
- Goggins hints at a second season for
Justified: City Primeval
, revealing potential storylines involving Raylan and Boyd for fans to anticipate. - The miniseries reignited passion for characters like Raylan and Boyd, setting the stage for a potential return despite the lack of FX renewal.
- Based on Elmore Leonard’s work,
City Primeval
showcases Raylan’s journey from retirement in Miami to a showdown in Detroit.
Last summer saw the return of one of television’s coolest U.S. Marshalls, Raylan Givens, with the neo-Western crime drama follow-up Justified: City Primeval. Eight years after the original series wrapped up its six-season run, Timothy Olyphant‘s eight-episode miniseries comeback that whisked him away from Harlan County, Kentucky to Detroit was lauded by critics and fans alike as one of the best programs to grace the small screen in 2023. However, a renewal has yet to come from FX despite the success and an ending that seemed to set up a second season. If/when that confirmation does come though, Walton Goggins says the entire team is ready at the drop of Raylan’s iconic Stetson.
During an exclusive interview with Screen Rant while at SXSW for his latest film, The Uninvited, Goggins provided a positive update regarding City Primeval from the perspective of the cast and crew. The star memorably played the original show’s longest-enduring antagonist Boyd Crowder, a terrorist and frequent thorn in Givens’s side who finally seemed to be locked away for good by the series finale. In last year’s revival, however, he made a shocking cameo to close out the season, teasing more trouble on the horizon for Raylan with his frenemy should the show continue.
Goggins found that returning to the series, even for a brief time, was enough to reignite the passion for the characters and the world they inhabit. City Primeval proved to him and other returning team members that there was still more to be explored with Raylan, Boyd, and so many others in a future installment. All that’s needed now, he says, is for the green light from FX:
“There’s always a future in my imagination. Always. I think everybody – all the players involved – want another lap. I didn’t anticipate that, and it took a while to kind of jump back into that. But once we did it, we kind of kept it from everybody. I had such a good time, and I think Tim was inspired. And there is more to say, actually. I didn’t think there was, but there is. Everything is in line. I think everybody’s just waiting for schedules and FX to say, ‘Go.’ We’ll see. We’ll see what happens.”
How Does ‘Justified: City Primeval’ Set Up Another Season?
City Primeval is based on Elmore Leonard‘s novel City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit and the short story “Fire in the Hole”, and begins with Raylan on the verge of retirement, content to live a quiet life in Miami with his daughter. That is until he has the chance to head to Detroit and take down the elusive and violent Clement Mansell (Boyd Holbrook), better known as The Oklahoma Wildman. By the end of his latest game of cat and mouse, though, the series ensures that his work is far from done by not only releasing Goggins’s Boyd back into the world but briefly uniting Raylan with another Leonard hero, Detective Raymond Cruz, played by Paul Calderón in a reprisal of his role from Steven Soderbergh‘s Out of Sight. There’s still a score to settle for Givens and Crowder, and a second season could see the restless lawman continue to bleed into other stories from the author that further suit him.
Justified: City Primeval hails from showrunners Michael Dinner and Dave Andron with Aunjanue Ellis, Vondie Curtis-Hall, Adelaide Clemens, Marin Ireland, Victor Williams, Norbert Leo Butz, and Vivian Olyphant among the other cast members. All episodes are currently streaming on Hulu and can be purchased on Blu-ray and DVD. Stay tuned here at Collider for more on a potential second season.
Justified: City Primeval
Eight years after he’s left Kentucky, Givens is now based in Miami, balancing life as a marshal and part-time father of a 14-year-old girl. A chance encounter on a Florida highway sends him to Detroit and he crosses paths with Clement Mansell, aka The Oklahoma Wildman, a violent sociopath who’s already slipped through the fingers of Detroit’s finest once and wants to do so again.
Release Date July 18, 2023
Main Genre Drama
Seasons 1
