What To Remember About Justified And Raylan Givens Before Watching Justified: City Primeval

It's been eight years since audiences last watched Deputy U.S. Marshall Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) don his cowboy hat to face off against Kentucky's meanest and most dangerous (and, often, most boneheaded). The character, who was created by the late author Elmore Leonard and embodied with effortless swagger by Olyphant, spent six seasons chasing down redneck criminals, suspicious snake charmers, and members of the Dixie Mafia before the series bowed out with a fantastic finale in 2015.

Aside from a delightful cameo in an episode of "The Good Place" in 2020, we haven't heard a word from Raylan Givens since, but the character is set to return this summer for "Justified: City Primeval." The new show moves the drama to Detroit, where the late author Elmore Leonard set his 1980 novel "City Primeval." There, Raylan is set to meet new friends and foes — including a particularly nasty fellow nicknamed the Oklahoma Wildman (Boyd Holbrook). Since it's been nearly a decade since "Justified" first went off the air, let's have a refresher course on where Raylan's been and what's up next for the modern-day cowboy.

At the beginning of "Justified," U.S. Marshall Raylan was transferred from his job in Florida to his home district of Harlan, Kentucky, an area rife with drugs, guns, neo-Nazis, and blue-collar crime, not to mention a legacy of backbreaking labor at the local coal mines. Raylan himself dug coal as a teenager, as did his classmate Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins), but while Raylan became a law enforcement officer, Boyd grew up into an ever-evolving crime boss. Boyd starts the show preaching hateful rhetoric, but he's actually just a skilled bullshitter trying to find a dumb, violent following wherever he can.

Throughout the show, Raylan faces criminals like insidious moonshiner Mags (Margot Martindale, whose character was the guardian of Kaitlyn Dever's Loretta) and suit-clad mobster Robert Quarles (Neal McDonough), but the show ended with him putting his frenemy Boyd behind bars. Boyd and Raylan's ex Ava (Joelle Carter) ended the show's original run living under an assumed name and raising her and Boyd's son, though Boyd thinks she's dead.

While Raylan is set to start working with a new team in Detroit (the sequel series has a whole new supporting cast), his old squad included boss Art Mullen (Nick Searcy) and colleagues Rachel (Erica Tazel) and Tim (Jacob Pitts). At the end of season 6, Raylan moves back to Florida and raises his daughter with his ex, Winona (Natalie Zea), who has always wanted him to quit his dangerous job. The new series will see Raylan's daughter return as a teenager, played by Olyphant's own kid, Vivian Olyphant. It's also worth noting that Raylan's own dad totally sucked, and he died during the show's original run, and Raylan has a chip on his shoulder about being a better father than his own.

"Justified" spent six seasons tackling the myth of the Western hero, but it also couldn't help but reinforce it in scenes of stylish gunfighting and outlaw justice. Still, the show was a lot more nuanced than a simple story of a good cop catching bad guys, as the villains were often richly textured and empathetic and the heroes at times crossed major ethical lines. After all, the entire series is named after Raylan's excuse – "it was justified" – for the shooting that lands him back in Kentucky. Raylan was never really a dirty cop (he often spent full seasons trying to avoid putting down his enemies or talking them out of their plans), but he definitely benefited from the protection offered by his job when shaking down villains or facing off against them.

Discussions of law enforcement violence certainly look different in 2023 than they did in 2010, and "Justified: City Primeval," which is set in what was once the largest majority-Black city in America, frequently engages with the tricky and deeply biased nature of "justice" as a concept. At ATX television festival earlier this year, executive producer Dave Adron participated in a panel discussion about guns on TV and said that "the conversations in the writer's room [for 'City Primeval'] were quite a bit different, about how we would approach gun violence, about how [Raylan] would think about his own gunslinging."

Raylan, you might recall, is a notoriously talented shooter. In several scenes in the original series, he sits opposite criminals at a table for an old-school-style quick draw. The series finale climaxes in a shootout on a highway road in which both Raylan and his opponent are knocked back — only it turns out Raylan only got shot in his signature cowboy hat.

The original run of "Justified" was inspired by the late acclaimed novelist Elmore Leonard's story "Fire in the Hole." Leonard executive-produced the series before passing away in 2013, and even won a Peabody Award for it. Leonard published three novels about Raylan over the years, including 1993's "Pronto," 1995's "Riding the Rap," and 2012's "Raylan," the last book released before he died. The latter book was both influenced by Graham Yost's TV adaptation and influential to it, contributing some plotlines to season 3.

Leonard fans looking for the textual basis for "Justified" City Primeval" won't be able to keyword search by Raylan's name, though: the new show is based on a Leonard novel that didn't actually feature Raylan at all. "City Primeval" follows a homicide detective called Raymond Cruz, but it does feature the key criminals who come into play in the new season: the Oklahoma Wildman AKA Clement Mansel, a corrupt Detroit judge, and members of an Albanian organized crime group. In addition to Holbrook and Vivian Olyphant, the new cast of characters includes attorney Carolyn Wilder (Aunjanue Ellis), Mansel's girlfriend Sandy (Adelaide Clemens), a barman named Sweety (Vondie Curtis-Hall), and local Detroit cops played by Marin Ireland, Norbert Leo Butz, and Victor Williams.

"Justified: City Primeval" returns to FX on Tuesday, July 18, 2023.