'Justified: City Primeval' puts Detroit in the spotlight for the return of Raylan Givens

Thirty-seven miles from Detroit, the latest criminal to take on deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens is speeding down a highway in a stolen 1970s Chevelle SS.

Clement Mansell, a nihilistic troublemaker nicknamed "the Oklahoma Wildman," pops in a cassette, cranks up “Seven Nation Army” and then tosses the smartphone of the car’s rightful owner out the window. Soon enough, the Renaissance Center is visible in the distant skyline.

This sure feels like Elmore Leonard territory. And luckily for TV viewers, it is. “Justified: City Primeval” arrives Tuesday on FX, a decade after Leonard’s death at age 87 and eight years after the original “Justified” series ended its acclaimed six-season run on the same cable network.

The eight-episode limited series combines Raylan, the Detroit author's sexy, seething character from Harlan, Kentucky, who inspired the original "Justified” series — and who was definitively played by a Stetson-wearing Timothy  Olyphant — and a classic Leonard book that doesn’t feature him.

What “City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit,” the 1980 Detroit-set novel that provides the story here, does have is one of Leonard's scariest antagonists. He’s volatile, trigger-happy Clement (portrayed by a magnetic Boyd Holbrook), a sociopathic killer who is about to wreak havoc in Detroit mostly because he can.

From its start in 2010, “’Justified” set the bar for TV adaptations of Leonard’s work, earning kudos from critics and many Emmy nominations, plus two wins for guest actors. Executive producer Graham Yost was so determined to honor the style of Leonard’s lean, evocative prose that he gave the cast and crew WWED bracelets (as in “What would Elmore do?") to keep the mission clear.

In turn, Leonard, whose books had frequently been mishandled by Hollywood, actually liked “Justified” (which was inspired by his 2001 novella "Fire in the Hole") and its interpretation of Raylan, a character that he described to the Free Press in 2012 as “cool, in a very not showy way, but an honest way." The Dickens of Detroit, as Leonard was sometimes called, dedicated "Raylan," the 2012 novel he wrote during the run of the series, to Yost and Olyphant.

When “Justified” ended in 2015, “we felt like we stuck the landing,” says Michael Dinner, who would team up with another veteran of the show, Dave Andron, to serve as executive producer and co-showrunner of “Justified: City Primeval.” The final episode, always a tricky proposition for long-running hits, was considered nearly ideal.

So why tamper with a successful goodbye? The road to Raylan’s return began a while later, when Peter Leonard, Elmore’s son, asked Dinner whether he would be interested in developing a series based on “City Primeval,” which almost had been turned into a movie by director Sam Peckinpah and later by director Quentin Tarantino.

“I said: ‘Well, I've always loved the book. It's kind of this little jewel in Elmore’s canon. Yeah, I would be interested,‘” recounts Dinner from London via Zoom. He already had started writing a script when he got a call in Rome from Olyphant, who was filming Tarantino’s 2019 drama “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” at that point.

Recalls Dinner: “He said, ‘You know I’ve been sitting on the set with Quentin, and we were talking about ‘City Primeval.' ... It would make a great year of ‘Justified,’ don't you think?’ And I said, ‘Well, that's interesting that you bring it up ...’”

And thus a Leonard mash-up was born.

"Justified: City Primeval" isn’t a continuation of Raylan’s old life. It’s more the start of an entirely new chapter. Says Dinner: “What I feel good about, what people seem to be responding to, is that it feels tonally like Elmore’s universe. It feels tonally like the show that we did (before). But it feels a little more grown up, a little edgier. It is a different world for Raylan.”

The actions begins 15 years after Raylan's series-ending move from Kentucky to Miami. His infant daughter, Willa, is now a teenager (played by Olyphant’s real-life daughter Vivian) who's being taken by her dad to a summer camp for wayward kids. After a skirmish with carjackers interrupts them, Raylan finds himself in Detroit — a trip that will increase tensions with his daughter and put him on a dangerous collision course with Clement.

The new characters surrounding Raylan include Clement's defense attorney, Carolyn Wilder (Aunjanue Ellis),  a formidable figure who spars with Raylan in court, intriguing him as she does. As brought to life by the "King Richard" Oscar nominee, Carolyn is one of the most compelling on-screen women from the Leonard universe.

Detroit native Vondie Curtis-Hall plays Marcus (Sweety) Sweeton, a bar owner and former Motown bass player with a past connection to Clement that still haunts him. Victor Williams (Deacon of “King of Queens”) is a Detroit police detective poised for retirement, while Norbert Leo Butz is his swaggering colleague, prone to telling outsiders that this is how things are done in Detroit.

There also is a juicy supporting role for newcomer Alex Pobutsky, who's from Hamtramck and plays a young Albanian mobster from the same town. Pobutsky posted on social media about being an AP English student at University of Detroit Jesuit High when he got to meet Leonard in 2010 during the author's visit to his alma mater, "and now I'm IN his show!"

Filming took place Chicago, a decision driven by Michigan’s lack of film incentives, according to Dinner. While he says there were some budget strains caused by a number of COVID-19 cases, what wound up temporarily pausing production was a news-making incident in July 2022: Three cars crashed through the barriers of an outdoor set and multiple gunshots were exchanged

“We were supposed to go to Detroit for three or four days with the actors. We were not able to because we had to shut down,” says Dinner.

A second unit did make the trip to film exteriors of familiar sites like Comerica Park, the Joe Louis fist monument, the Ambassador Bridge and so on. Although Dinner was disappointed that more couldn’t be done in Detroit, he says he thinks they “did pretty well” in using Chicago as the D’s double.

Detroit references are sprinkled liberally throughout the episodes through mentions of Stroh’s beer, a glimpse of a local newscast with Fox 2 Detroit’s Taryn Asher and Brandon Hudson, a close-up of a Detroit Free Press left outside a hotel room (and changed here into a tabloid newspaper) and an impassioned speech by a Wayne County circuit court judge (Keith David) who becomes a key figure in the plot and speaks early on of having “thrived in this racist-ass city, in this racist-ass system, for over 30 years.”

The limited series delves into issues of race in the same matter-of-fact, character-driven way that Leonard did. ”We wanted to make sure that Detroit was represented correctly, that law enforcement was represented correctly, that we had complicated characters, that it wasn't preachy,” says Dinner. In exploring Raylan and Carolyn’s dynamic and Sweety’s role as what Dinner calls the story's emotional spine, "I think what we accomplished was to do a story about race without making it about race,“ he says.

So who was the main Elmore whisperer on the set in term of staying true to the Leonard spirit? Dinner defines it as a group effort that included himself, Andron and Yost (also an executive producer), along with a newcomer to the “Justified” team, acclaimed crime novelist Walter Mosley, who might qualify as a "Justified" super-fan.

“Walter knew Elmore , and we'd call him the librarian because he could keep us honest, not only about the black experience, but also he loved the show so much,” say Dinner, noting how Mosley would cite moments from old episodes that he and Andron barely remembered.

And, of course, there was Olyphant, who is perhaps the biggest Leonard advocate of all. The actor loved Leonard, according to Dinner, and has been an advocate of the WWED approach since the origina's pilot.

Says Ellis of Olyphant's approach,, “When I tell you that he carries that (Leonard) world on his back on his show, not just on his back, it's like, within his veins. ... He is a Leonard purist, he really, really is. And he is very intentional about making sure that what we are doing stays in what that show was doing, stays in that world. He really comes to work every day to honor Elmore Leonard.”

Williams says he savored the chance to work with Olyphant and producers who had such a clear vision. “They know Elmore Leonard the way, when I went to school, there were people who just know Chekhov, and there are people who just know Shakespeare. ... They really understand how it works, why it works, if it's off track, what to do to get it back on track. So what I loved is truly leaning in on what they had to say.”

Ultimately, “Justified: City Primeval” matches “Justified” in terms of providing no easy answers and presenting no characters as one-dimensional, which likely would have made Leonard very happy.

“The opportunity of doing Elmore stuff is that the protagonists are flawed characters who are good at what they do, but they may be a mess in their personal lives," says Dinner. “He writes these antagonists who, I like to say, sometimes they're embraceable, sometimes they're redeemable. If they're neither one, they're just interesting.”

The tension and explosiveness of Raylan vs. Clement certainly fits that description. Or as the police detective portrayed by Williams puts it succinctly: “Sometimes it takes an angry white guy to catch an angry white guy."

Interviews for this article were conducted before the start of the SAG-AFTRA actors strike. Contact Detroit Free Press pop culture critic Julie Hinds at jhinds@freepress.com.

'Justified: City Primeval'

Series premiere

10 p.m. Tue.

FX (also streaming on Hulu)

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: 'Justified: City Primeval' draws Raylan Givens into danger in Detroit