It’s been eight years since U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) packed up his Stetson hat and moved down to Miami in the series finale of FX’s consistently excellent “Justified.” (Although it’s 15 years in the world of the show.) As if he’s never left, he glides back into the television landscape this month with “Justified: City Primeval,” an eight-episode limited series that adapts Elmore Leonard’s 1980 book, “City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit,” into a new standalone story. Fans will miss iconic characters like Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins), but the writers here, including series vets Dave Andron and Michael Dinner, introduce so many fantastic new ones that it lessens the grief. Once again, “Justified” is rich with character detail, backstory, clever plotting, and moral quandaries, with another stellar Olyphant performance holding it all together. No one did crime fiction quite like Leonard (who also wrote the books on which “Out of Sight” and “Jackie Brown” were based, among many other adaptations), and while “City Primeval” may not be his most beloved text, it proves to be a great example of how well “Justified” expanded on Leonard’s universe and themes in the first place.
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Once again, FX gives us a Western that just happens to take place in the Midwest. The classic lawman archetype returns in the form of Raylan Givens, who is reintroduced taking his daughter Willa (Vivian Olyphant, Timothy’s actual daughter) to a facility after a violent incident. On the way, they basically stumble into the world of a vicious criminal named Clement Mansell (Boyd Holbrook), aka The Oklahoma Wildman. He’s on his way back to Detroit, where he caused some serious trouble a few years ago and got away with it. One of the themes of “City Primeval” is how looking the other way when evil surfaces only empowers it, and Mansell is pure evil.
At first, Givens is in Detroit merely testifying in a case that involves the run-in with his daughter that opens the series, but when the judge in that case (Keith David) ends up murdered by Mansell, Raylan basically gets stuck in the Motor City, trying to solve multiple murders before the body count rises further. This brings him into the sphere of some fantastically sketched characters, including Mansell’s battle-hardened attorney, Carolyn Wilder (Aunjanue Ellis) and cops who like to talk tough about how things get done in Detroit like Maureen Downey (Marin Ireland), Norbert Beryl (Norbert Leo Butz), and Wendell Robinson (Victor Williams).
While all of these various lawmen are trying to solve the judge’s murder, Mansell is colluding with his girlfriend Sandy (Adelaide Clemens) to pull a con job on an unsuspecting idiot who happens to have ties to the Albanian mob. Of course, that leads to more potential danger around the fringe of “City Primeval.” Mansell also reunites with a reluctant former ally named Sweety (Vondie Curtis-Hall), who runs a Detroit bar and knows where more than a few local bodies are buried. Various degrees of corruption course through every vein in the city of this show, suggesting that people will always look the other way for the right price. Well, everyone but Raylan Givens.
Andron and Dinner have such a firm grip when it comes to episodic versus season structure. Rather than succumb to the recent disease of limited series that are really just chopped-up feature film scripts, they have produced a show that works both chapter by chapter and when taken as a whole. The main way they maintain this momentum is by trusting an ace ensemble with detailed, rich characters, people who feel like they existed before the series began and (well, most of them) will continue after it ends. So much modern television fails in this department, lacking characters who are as richly drawn as even the most minor ones on “City Primeval.”
Of course, it helps to have a cast up to the challenge of playing people with rich back stories. Ellis, a recent Oscar nominee for “King Richard,” nails a kind of world-weariness that comes with having to collude with amoral people to serve a greater good. “Justified” was always about gray areas of morality and “City Primeval” continues that theme without hammering it like a crooked nail. It’s just there in the background of these characters, and performers like Ellis, Hall, Williams, Ireland, and especially Olyphant know how to use it as a backdrop instead of obviously foregrounding the themes of the show. And the casting agent here deserves special citation in the supporting department too as familiar faces like David Cross and Terry Kinney show up in later episodes and fit in perfectly.
It helps a great deal that “City Primeval” uses the typically great plotting of Elmore Leonard, someone who knew how to craft a tale of lawmen and criminals as well as anyone who ever wrote crime fiction. This is essentially a story of a good guy (Raylan) taking down a truly bad guy (Clement), but the journey from point A to point B includes a few brilliant, unexpected routes. It’s also fascinating how often “City Primeval” avoids the potential potholes on that journey. Without spoiling, there are several times in which it feels like this series could have swerved into clichés, but it always heads in the other direction. It plays with elements like Raylan’s father/daughter dynamic or an old relationship for Carolyn without making them the awkward center of attention for multiple episodes. The writing is so consistently strong through all eight episodes that one can see how it inspired all of the performers, especially Olyphant. And it’s worth noting how well “City Primeval” uses varied settings in Detroit, telling a story that takes place from seedy dive bars to Bloomfield Hills mansions, and numerous places in between (even if most of it was actually shot in Chicago).
Is this the actual end of “Justified?” Someone in a cowboy hat would come after a critic who spoiled how this story ends, but “City Primeval” doesn’t merely justify its existence, it makes one wish that FX could find a way to insert Raylan Givens into other Elmore Leonard books in the future. He’s that rich and complex a character. “Justified” may not officially be back, but let’s hope that Raylan sticks around for a while. [A-]  
“Justified: City Primeval” debuts on FX on July 18.