Looks like we can thank Quentin Tarantino for the upcoming season of Justified
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Though he’s known chiefly online for pioneering the art of feet pics, Quentin Tarantino also makes movies. And when he isn’t making his own movies, he’s giving away ideas for free. That’s what happened with the new season of Justified, anyway. Speaking to EW, Dave Andron and Michael Dinner, the showrunners of the upcoming Justified revival, Justified: City Primeval, explain how the whole thing came together while star Timothy Olyphant was shooting Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood.
“One day the phone rang and it was Tim Olyphant who said, ‘I’ve been sitting on the set with Quentin, and we were talking about this book, City Primeval. We thought it would make a great year of Justified.’ So we started kicking around the idea, and FX was into it,” said Michael Dinner. “It was very complicated to put together because the rights situation was a little murky — part of the rights belonged to the estate, part belonged to MGM which was going to make this movie several times, and it took a while to get it going, but then we did.”
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Dinner considers City Primeval the “crown jewel of Elmore Leonard’s work,” a dangling thread left in Justified’s wake. They weren’t the only ones:
A lot of people had wanted to make this book before. It almost got made by [Sam] Peckinpah years ago as a movie, and [Quentin] Tarantino wanted to make it as a movie, and a lot of people wanted to play with it in television, streaming or cable. We had a great experience doing Justified, and some years later Elmore’s son had approached me about doing it as its own thing. I’d always loved the book, we always referenced it when we were in the writers’ room on the original series, and so that was the intention: It was going to be its own thing.
Tarantino might get his chance. Earlier this year, we learned that he might direct a few episodes, so everyone can get their feet jokes locked and loaded now. However, the new direction means we’ll see fewer familiar faces this season. “Some old characters do show up, but that’s one of those things the audience is going to have to get their head around: It is a pretty new cast. It’s a new group of cops that are around him,” said Ardon. “It’s cops in Detroit, not marshals in Kentucky, and it really is a standalone Raylan story, just with a few old friends sprinkled throughout.”
That all sounds well and good, but the lack of the names Boyd Crowder and Walton Goggins is very concerning. Maybe Tarantino can start chatting with his old Hateful Eight buddy and give these two a call.
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