Justified EPs Tried to Include This Season 2 Fan Favorite in City Primeval, But It ‘Made No Sense’

Longtime Justified fans nearly got another blast from Raylan Givens’ storied past when watching FX’s City Primeval limited series. (Full Justified: City Primeval spoilers follow!)

To recap that which co-showrunner Michael Dinner shared with TVLine earlier this week: The original intention was to do a straight adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s crime novel City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit, with Detroit police detective Raymond Cruz at the center. But when franchise lead Timothy Olyphant got to mulling a City Primeval series with feature film director Quentin Tarantino, while on the set of Once Upon a time in Hollywood, they got the idea to insert Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens into the middle of the action.

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As such, Justified: City Primeval was never envisioned as a full reboot of Justified per se. Ergo the absence — for much of the eight episodes, that is — of any familiar faces besides Raylan’s.

Until, of course, the finale drew to a close, and viewers got cameos from Chief Deputy U.S. Marshals Dan Grant and Gregg Sutter, followed by a Raylan/Winona reunion that was “complicated” by his disclosure that he had finally decided to lay down his badge.

The true crowd-pleaser, though, was the reemergence of Walton Goggins’ Boyd Crowder, who before City Primeval faded to black had orchestrated a prison escape during his transfer to a hospital — ostensibly setting up any future adventures for the Justified franchise.

But for a hot second during development, the EPs considered squeezing in another fan favorite character: Kaitlyn Dever’s Loretta McCready, who figured into Justified‘s stellar second season, as an ersatz ward of Margo Martindale’s mischievous Mags Bennett. Loretta wound up placed with a proper foster home, though the character did resurface during the FX series’ finale season.

“We tried to figure a way to get Loretta into the story we did in Detroit… just because we love the actress,” Dinner shared with The Prestige TV Podcast co-host Joanna Robinson, but it “made no sense.” And in the end, any such callbacks needed to be “organic,” he maintained.

Dever, in the years since her Justified run, went on to earn an Emmy Award nomination for her role in Hulu’s acclaimed Dopesick mini, plus Golden Globe nods for both Dopesick and Netflix’s Unbelievable.

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