It Still Stings: The Justified Revival Was Great, But Still Needed Walton Goggins

The final season of Justified brought the acclaimed drama to a fitting end, closing the book on the saga of U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) and career criminal Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins) back in 2015, after six excellent seasons of shootouts, shocks and wisecracks. Raylan moved to Florida to be closer to his daughter, and Boyd finally ended up back behind bars, but still cooking up his next scheme, as always.

But with the series ending on a high note, and Olyphant only getting more popular thanks to subsequent roles in Star Wars series The Mandalorian (where he basically plays a space cowboy sheriff version of Raylan) and Netflix’s hit zombie comedy Santa Clarita Diet, FX decided to revisit the world of Justified a full eight years later with the miniseries City Primeval. It essentially picks up with Raylan several years later for one last case as he starts to realize he might be getting a bit too old for this kind of life. But as good as City Primeval is, it stands out just as much for what it wasn’t as for what it was.

To be clear: Justified doesn’t miss. The original FX series is some of the best television ever put to screen, and the years-later 2023 miniseries was one of the best things to hit TV last year. But when it comes to Justified, the grading scale is incredibly high, fair or not.

Where the original Justified run spent pretty much all of its six seasons in the rural hills of Kentucky where Raylan grew up, City Primeval finds him picking up a case in the streets of Detroit, Michigan—a far cry from the coal-digging locals and dirt roads of where he typically calls home. Therein lies the crux of what made City Primeval a surprising, if odd-fitting, chapter in Raylan’s story. Yes, Justified was framed around Raylan’s struggle to keep order and find justice in a way that fits both the letter of the law and his own code, but it worked so damn well because it gave him the perfect foil in Goggins’ charming, layered criminal Boyd Crowder.

Which is why the decision to largely omit Boyd from the show’s return makes it all the more disappointing.

Though Goggins only recurred in Season 1, the creators quickly saw how their dynamic was one of the best things about the series, and Goggins joined the show as a series regular for the rest of its run, with the story focus often shifting between Raylan and Boyd’s exploits. Even when Justified introduced new and different antagonists season-to-season, Boyd was the one constant across it all. 

Goggins cut his teeth fleshing out one of the most delightfully damaged characters in a crime series (before Boyd Crowder, of course) in FX’s gritty cop drama The Shield in the role of Shane Vendrell, a dirty cop who we get to watch the walls close in on inch by inch over seven nerve-wracking seasons. But in Boyd Crowder, Goggins found a role with the nuance to truly stretch his talents, bringing to life a criminal you can’t help but hope will get away with it all in the end—even while you’re simultaneously rooting for the U.S. Marshal trying to catch him, too.

Raylan and Boyd are two sides of the same coin—two men who grew up in the hills of Kentucky, worked side by side digging coal as young men, and see the world through their own lens of rules and honor. As much as Justified was Raylan’s story, it was equally Boyd’s story, too. Whether they liked it or not, their fates were intertwined for six dynamite seasons on the original series.

But in the show’s long-awaited return with City Primeval, Boyd is effectively absent (well, more on that later), as the series introduces a new antagonist in Boyd Holbrook’s Clement Mansell. Mansell is one of the most dangerous foes Raylan has faced, a charming but ruthless criminal carving a swath of chaos across Detroit while Raylan teams with local authorities to try and stop him.

Holbrook puts together a phenomenal performance, effectively channeling the chaos and rage of Mansell, while also creating a likable connection with Raylan along the way. In perspective, the choice to focus on a new, younger villain makes sense. This is an older Raylan, trying to figure out how to balance his career as a Marshal with his duties as the father of a teenage daughter (played by Olyphant’s real-life daughter, Vivian), and grappling with how this case throws away the sense of a criminal’s code of honor his old foes like Boyd seemed to value. Mansell is wild and violent for violence’s sake, and that’s something we see Raylan processing in his own way, as the world has changed since we last saw him.

Despite Holbrook’s greatness, City Primeval is still missing something crucial: that funhouse reflection of himself that Raylan always found in Boyd, which deepened the show’s themes and the richness of its locale. Holbrook’s villain gives City Primeval a darker tone but at the cost of that sense of balance. It’s a storytelling choice, which absolutely works in its own way, but it still makes for an odd tonal follow-up to the original series.

Which makes the decision to spend the last few minutes of the City Primeval finale focusing on Boyd—bringing back Goggins for a glorified cameo—all the stranger. With Raylan retired and settling into his new, quieter life, we cut to Boyd in prison, where we see him stage a classic Boyd Crowder prison break and ride off into the sunset. The series’ closing shot is that of Raylan and his daughter lounging on a boat, as Raylan’s phone rings to alert him to the escape.

For Justified fans, the show ended at arguably its most interesting point. You can respect the decision to focus on a new antagonist and a new story, telling a new chapter in Raylan’s life. But circling back in the final moments to reintroduce Boyd just seems incredibly strange from a storytelling perspective. All it did was remind fans how much they missed this character in the first place. If you were planning to bring Goggins back anyway, why not include him in a role where he and Olyphant could actually interact? There have been reports the pair were on less-than-ideal terms by the end of Justified’s original run due to the stress of ending the show, but it sounds like they largely buried the hatchet in the years since it ended. It’s just a shame they couldn’t find a way to run it back, one last time.

But who knows? Maybe a few more years down the line we’ll eventually get the season that closing shot of City Primeval teed up. They dug coal together, after all. That connection transcends all.

Trent Moore is a recovering print journalist, and freelance editor and writer with bylines at lots of places. He likes to find the sweet spot where pop culture crosses over with everything else. Follow him at @trentlmoore on Twitter.

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