The Big Picture

Justified: City Primeval takes place 15 years after the original series, with Raylan Givens dealing with his teenage daughter and a violent sociopath. The showrunners discuss how they decided on the ending of the season finale, which wraps up the season-long story while also connecting it back to the history of the series. The showrunners hint at the possibility of another season, mentioning unfinished business and a massive lie that would need to be dealt with.

[Editor’s note: The following contains major spoilers for Justified: City Primeval. Do not read this interview prior to watching the season finale.]In the FX series Justified: City Primeval, set 15 years after U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) left Kentucky behind, dealing with his often uncooperative 15-year-old daughter (played by Olyphant’s real-life daughter, Vivian Olyphant) has added to the challenge of stopping violent sociopath Clement Mansell (Boyd Holbrook). With his usually cool exterior rankled and a desire to wrap the case up without crossing too many lines, Raylan just wants to make it out of Detroit alive so that he can figure out what’s next.

After screening the season finale, Collider got the opportunity to chat with showrunners Dave Andron and Michael Dinner about how the finale came together, when the idea first came about, what they hope it all means moving forward, getting back on the set with some of the original cast members, whether there was a backup plan for if everything hadn’t gone according to plan, wrapping things up with Clement Mansell, the Raylan-Carolyn (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) dynamic, and what the chances are that they’ll get to do another season.

Collider: I really loved this season and thought the finale was absolutely perfect, so thank you for that.

DAVE ANDRON: We feel pretty lucky that it doesn’t seem like it’s been ruined for anybody yet. Everybody’s been pretty respectful, in the way they’ve been writing or talking about it. And Walton [Goggins] is out there telling anyone who will listen that he’s not in it, God bless him.

Image via FX Networks

I’m one of those people who thought the original series ended perfectly, and as much as I wanted to see the return of this show and the character of Raylan Givens, I was also very nervous about it. Now that I’ve seen the whole season and know that it’s a great season with another great finale, how did you decide on the ending? How did you get to the decision to essentially have two different endings, wrapping up the season-long story that you’re telling, but then also connecting it back to the history of the series?

DINNER: Everybody knows the story that, when this started out, it wasn’t gonna be a Justified show. Tim [Olyphant] called up and said, “Quentin [Tarantino] and I were talking, blah, blah, blah.” Dave and I started to work together, to put it together, and that was Dave’s first pitch. He said, “It would be great to get Walton in here.” And I’ve gotta be honest, I had some concerns about it because one of the approaches we wanted to take was to catapult Raylan. This could have been called City Primeval. In some ways, it was a marketing thing to call it Justified: City Primeval. It’s not Justified. Justified landed whatever it was, six or seven years ago. It was a different thing, that Raylan happened to be in. And so, our original intention was, if it was organic to bring a character in, great, but this is its own story. And then, Dave’s first pitch was, “How do we get Walton involved?” What we both didn’t wanna do was have this scene where Raylan, midway through this story, like Clarice, goes to see Hannibal and says, “I don’t know how to deal with this guy. Tell me what to do.” We didn’t wanna do that. Dave’s pitch was, “There’s a 10,000-pound elephant in the room and people are gonna ask where he is.” We did it, not for any reason other than to have a good time.

It was not easy because when we finally got the rights thing settled and we got the writing staff together, FX needed to sign off on it because we hadn’t pitched it to them yet. And then, Tim had to sign off on it. That story was over, so we didn’t know how Walton was gonna respond. What some people don’t realize is that Walton died in the original pilot. We had to keep him alive. And to get him in the original pilot, we had to do some arm twisting. He didn’t wanna play the bad guy. We said, “That’s not the intention. You’re not the bad guy. It’s this seminal relationship that we’re gonna jump into, in the pilot.” And then, he tested through the roof and he stayed on the series. But we didn’t know if Walton would wanna do it. When we pitched Walton, we felt we also needed to show him pages, which were written before Dave wrote the first script. They were his first crack at it. So, he gave them to Walton, and Walton flipped out. After reading those pages, Walton said, “If you want to, this is not the end.” So, not only did he wanna do this, but he opened the door a little bit.

ANDRON: When we were thinking about the end of this, it’s obviously a Raylan story more than it’s a Justified story. It’s a guy for whom the road ahead is a lot shorter, and what’s that gonna look like for him when he decides, “You know what? I think maybe it is time for me to walk away before I get carried off, or I cross a line that I don’t wanna cross?” He’s still maybe capable of that, even though he thought he’d put that to bed. Part of what I love about Elmore’s stuff, and that I think everybody loves about Elmore’s stuff, is that it feels like the dance is gonna continue. What was great about the end of our original series was that a lot of people expected one or both of those guys to end up dead, maybe, but that’s not how it goes, in Elmore’s world. In Elmore’s world, George Clooney ends up in the back of a prison van with Sam Jackson and with J. Lo up front, and they put him in the van with the guy who’s escaped from more prisons than anybody, ever. And so, it just felt like, if Raylan’s gonna walk away, it’s not he’s ever gonna not second guess the decision. How do you make the decision tough on him? How do you know, as an audience member, that it’s gonna eat at him?

Well, maybe the guy we put away, Boyd Crowder, wasn’t gonna just sit quiet in the corner of prison for the rest of his life. It just all felt really organic. It felt like a way that we could really serve these characters, and specifically serve Walton. When you think of Justified, you think of Raylan, but of course, you also think of Boyd. It just felt like a nice, organic way to bring him in, to really shine a light on what Raylan is gonna go through, having hung it up. He’s gonna have moments where he misses it. It’s always gonna be a part of him. So, to get to see Walton, and to have that moment of, “Oh, wait, has Boyd changed? Oh, no. He’s still the same dude.” It was a thrill for us, and it’s a thrill for the audience. It gives that Elmore Leonard feeling of, the story is gonna continue and these guys, in one way or another, are gonna keep dancing.

I can’t imagine any better way to have handled this.

DINNER: That’s great to hear. The other thing that I think is cool is that, when I look at this stuff, both of these characters feel 10 years older, even in subtle ways. Both Tim and Walton are so rock solid in this, and you feel like they’re starting the next decade in their lives. We also did it just to have a really good time.

Are you hoping to do a new season that focuses on another Raylan and Boyd showdown? In your dream scenario, what would that be?

ANDRON: We’ve obviously set it up, so that if everybody was interested in getting these guys to get out there and do one last dance, and we really knew what it was and why we were doing it, and we could end it again, in a really satisfying way, yeah, in theory, we’d be willing to go out there and take another swing at it. There were new things to say about Raylan in City Primeval, and there would be new things to say about Boyd in this incarnation. When you do a little bit of thinking about it, there is this massive thing that’s out there in the world, which is that Boyd has a kid that he doesn’t know about, and Raylan went to prison and didn’t tell him. It’s this really great, poignant end, but what he really does in that scene is lie to him and tell him that Ava is dead, and he makes sure that he doesn’t ever know that he’s got a son. There’s this massive lie that’s been told and this thing that’s hanging out there in the world. I don’t know how much of our audience was cognizantly really thinking about it. We weren’t really thinking too much about it, until we started to think about what that story might look like. And then, you pretty quickly realize that there is a thing that is out there, that would have to be dealt with.

DINNER: For Boyd’s character, there’s unfinished business. The minute we sprang him from prison, there’s a good chance that he’s gonna find out about the lie. And for Raylan, the first story was that you can’t go home again, and that was the story that took place in Harlan. The existential story is this is that the road in front of him is a lot shorter than the road behind. It is a second act. And there is a third act that, if people wanted to see it and the network wanted to show it, could be done. Unforgiven is one of one of our favorite movies. In that movie, the gunslinger who’s standing in pig shit has to strap on the gun and go back out in the field again. In a way, that’s Raylan’s story, if there’s a third story. The guy that he mined coal with exists in the world. We didn’t do it for that reason. If we end it today with the ending that we have, okay, fine. But if we feel there’s a story to be told and there’s an appetite for it, it would be great to do it. It would be awesome.

It also feels like taking Raylan to a point where he makes the decision that he’s going to retire and not do this anymore, that it would take Boyd Crowder to reel him back in.

ANDRON: Yeah, I think that’s right. He wouldn’t jump in, just for any old reason. He knows what Willa would think of that and what it might do to him. That’s part of the fun of that ending. You’re like, “Oh, shit, of all the things that could have happened, and of all the phone calls to get, that’s maybe the one that’s gonna make it really hard on him.”

Image via FX Networks

What was it like to get back on set with the OG Justified cast members?

DINNER: It’s like you’re back on the bicycle, riding the bike. Both the actors and the characters are a decade further down the road, which all comes into it. What Dave and I have taken away from this, whether it was the writers in the writers’ room or the actors on the set, is that we just had a good time. We didn’t do this because we wanted to reboot a show that we felt we had finished. We did it because we wanted to reboot the feeling that we had with the people working together, and I think we had that again. That was really the purpose of it, and that was easy.

How did Luis Guzmán end up playing the guard?

ANDRON: When we were thinking about who should be a part of that prison break, we wanted to misdirect of having a familiar face. He’s also somebody who’s been in the Elmore world. He was one of the prison escapees in Out of Sight, so we knew he loved the Elmo world. It just felt like a cool misdirect. You see him and you’re like, “Okay, he’s clearly gonna be a part of this thing.” And then, you do the fun flip where he’s actually the patsy. Our line producer, John LaBrucherie, who I’ve worked with on Snowfall for four or five years, did Shameless and knew Luis through that and being in Chicago. And so, when we were trying to figure out who it should be, he was like, “Why don’t I give Luis a call?” They’re close, so that was an easy phone call to make. And when Luis heard what it was, he immediately said, “Yeah, I’d love to.”

DINNER: When you cast, sometimes it’s great when you get a recognizable face and it steers the audience in a different direction. It was the same thing with Keith David, at the beginning. Even if you don’t know who he is, you’ve seen him so many times and you know his work, as an audience member, so you never expect him to be killed in the first episode. There’s nothing that’s more fun than killing a known face in the pilot. If there’s a connection to Elmore-land, if there’s a connection to the audience, and we can subvert the expectation, it’s pretty fun to do.

Was there a backup plan, if for some reason this didn’t work and if Walton Goggins didn’t want to do it, or wasn’t able to do it? Were there other options ready to go, or would it have just ended before all of that happened in the final episode?

ANDRON: Yeah, probably. I don’t think we ever discussed anything else. When this idea came, it felt fully formed, and we just figured it out.

DINNER: The pages were done, as we were writing the first script. We just would have had a different ending.

ANDRON: We had to shoot it well ahead of time because of Walton’s schedule. We didn’t shoot that at the end. We probably shot that at the halfway point of the whole thing, so that all had to be figured out and written and executed at that mid-point because of his availability.

DINNER: That was its own story. We had a one or two-day window with Walton because he was doing the Jonathan Nolan limited series (Fallout), or series, or whatever. We had a day or two, and specific dates, and then about 10 days before it was supposed to shoot, the state of Illinois, which Chicago was substituting for Detroit, called us and said, “You can’t shoot in any prison in Illinois because of COVID. We’re just under manned.” We had to do the unthinkable and pivot, so we pivoted to a prison that I had shot in a year and a half before, in Pittsburgh. It was an empty prison, so we were able to pivot to Pittsburgh within two hours, jump on a plane, and put it together. The other thing was, when they’re driving down the road, right before they do the turnabout on Luis’ character, they go over the bridge that you saw in Kentucky in the pilot of Justified. We were like, “We don’t have a lot of time to scout. What are we gonna do?” We were like, “You know, we shot the bridge and the road in the pilot. It would be great to go back to that.” John, the line producer, contacted the film commission, and three days after we shot there, they were about to demo the bridge. Usually it takes several weeks, but we were able to get the permits within a couple days. Everything worked out, but it was fraught with peril because, what would we have done? That was the only window we had with Walton.

Image via FX Networks

I’m curious about the portion of the ending involving Clement Mansell. Was he always going to end up dead? Did you discuss or consider different possibilities? Did you ever think about keeping him around?

ANDRON: I don’t think we ever figured that he would live on. We thought he was a bad enough guy that the only satisfying thing was gonna be to see him get what was coming to him. There were a few different ways in which we discussed how it might go down, but ultimately, it very much felt like the right thing that he die and that Raylan be the be the one who does it.

DINNER: We had to be careful about the ending. The original book is a test kitchen for Elmore. It was his first American crime novel, and it came out of writing Westerns. In some ways, some of the stuff in the book felt like a test kitchen for Raylan and for the story he was gonna tell in Fire in the Hole. So, we had to be careful about how we were gonna adapt that because that’s not quite the ending that was in the book. We also had to be careful because we’ve done so many showdowns before and it had to have its own spin. What I thought was cool about it was that this is a show of about blood, about fathers and sons, and about brothers. It always has been. Even what happens with his character feels like it organically grows out of that too. It took a while to wrestle that. It’s a different story than Raylan and Boyd. They understood each other. They mined coal together. Clement Mansell is a nihilist, which is scary. Raylan is a little bit older, and Mansell is so unpredictable. It’s a different relationship. We brought some stuff to it, but a lot of that character existed within the original book. The whole musician aspect is something that we created. We thought that would be fun to do. He’s one of the great bad guys that Elmore created.

ANDRON: It’s helpful to just get to steal from Elmore when you’re feeling like, how are we gonna create a new bad guy? Elmore did most of the heavy lifting for us, on that one.

I really loved Timothy Olyphant and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor together. There was something so interesting about that dynamic and about watching that relationship take shape, over the season. What did you just most enjoy about watching them together and seeing what they brought to that?

ANDRON: Personally, I loved finding the common ground between these two folks who, on many levels, don’t seem to have a whole lot in common. And I loved that it was two folks of a certain age and place in their lives, finding that connection amidst a lot of ugliness. I loved how unexpected it was. We really pushed ourselves to find that bond and create it. And then, watching two world class actors, getting to be together and bring it all to life. The whole thing felt like a pretty satisfying experience.

DINNER: She’s pretty formidable. We’ve seen him with women in the course of the series, but not someone really like this. There’s a difference between her and Winona. There’s a difference between her and the other women we’ve seen him with. She dismantles him in that courtroom. She’s a tough cookie. To me, she feels very real. Looking at her arc, the scene in the first episode, between her and her ex-husband, feels real. Even though we don’t get to spend a lot of time with her and Raylan, the intimacy that develops between the two of them, that scene that occurs, in the last episode, where she’s in the bathtub and she’s saying that she never wanted that house or that pool, and she knows that he’s leaving, felt like something I haven’t seen before. They’re equals, and I think that’s pretty cool.

It was really nice to see something finally pay off for her character, in the end. She feels like a character that’s both earned and deserves it, by the end of the season.

ANDRON: It felt like she had waded through enough shit to get out a little clean on the other side, or as clean as you can, anyway.

Image via FX Networks

In all seriousness, what are the chances that there will be another season? Are you hopeful and feeling positive about that possibility? What exactly does that depend on? When will you know if that’s going to happen?

ANDRON: There are two things to it. I know FX measures whether they wanna continue something with, do they like it? Do the critics respond to it? Do people watch it? I feel like those boxes are probably checked. So then, it’s really about the willingness of the creatives to get back in there and do more, and coming up with the right story. They’re not gonna just say, “Go do whatever you want.” As you pointed out, we’re all cognizant of having landed that plane well once. Now, maybe as you said, we’ve done it twice. Do you push your luck and do it a third time? I have to have faith, with the people involved with this, that we would figure it out. We certainly would not do it out of fear. I don’t think that’s a good reason to do something, or not do something.

Justified: City Primeval is available to stream at Hulu.