Revival shows have become a big part of modern television, and each one presents the same question: is a new run of episodes a one-time thing or is the goal to create multiple seasons. Every series has its own answer, but in the specific case of Justified: City Primeval starring Timothy Olyphant, the answer is a big non-committal “it depends.”
The FX revival show is now seven episodes into its eight episode run, the finale set to premiere tonight, and executive producer/co-showrunner Michael Dinner has addressed the aforementioned question about the future. Speaking with TV Line, the producer explained that there isn’t presently a plan for a Justified: City Primeval Season 2, but if the network expresses a desire to see more episodes made, that could lead to productive conversations that ultimately result in more TV adventures with Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens. Said Dinner,
It’s up to FX — what they want to do, if they want to tell another chapter. If they don’t, then, you know, it was good to do this, and we feel really good about where we ended.
Justified: City Primeval is set years after the finale of the original Justified series, and it finds a more subdued Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) in Detroit, Michigan dealing with a psychopath named Clement Mansell (Boyd Holbrook), who gets on Raylan’s radar after he kills a widely disliked judge (Keith David) and steals his tiny black book of secrets and blackmail. The excellent cast of the show also includes Aunjanue Ellis, Vondie Curtis-Hall, Adelaide Clemens, Marin Ireland, Victor Williams, and Norbert Leo Butz
The show is an adaptation of the Elmore Leonard novel City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit – which is notably not one of the author’s Raylan Givens stories. This fact makes it feel like there are a tremendous number of potential avenues for the future of Justified, as there is plenty of material in the Leonard bibliography that Michael Dinner and co-showrunner Dave Andron could mine (provided that they can get the rights to the books).
For now, the future is open-ended, but Dinner did stress in the interview that the goal with the new run of episodes wasn’t to try and bring back Justified for many years to come. He instead says that the goal was to reunite colleagues and tell the story that Justified: City Primeval tells:
We did this not to reboot Justified. We did it because we want to reboot the feeling that we had working with each other — whether it was me working with Tim, or [co-showrunner] David [Andron] and myself and the other writers, and what we felt in the writers room.
Stay tuned for more updates about the future of Justified, but for now, fans of the revival show can watch the Justified: City Primeval finale tonight on FX. The episode will be available to watch with a Hulu subscription starting at 12:00am PT tomorrow, and you can use the streaming service to catch up with the seven previous chapters now.