Spoilers and venting below.
I’m now six episodes into the “Justified: City Primeval,” an eight-episode sequel to perhaps the greatest neo-Western ever made. And the critical acclaim it’s received is increasingly incomprehensible. The drab series completely misses the point and strips the show of all the charisma, interpersonal drama, sense of place, humor — even the colors — that made the original so engrossing.
“Justified” brought a reluctant Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens back to his hometown of Harlan, Kentucky, to the poverty-ridden hollers, farms, and abandoned coal mines, where he was fluent in the customs and language of the locals. “Justified: City Primeval” inverts that formula, dropping Raylan in the alien world of Detroit, like some contemporary Walt Coogan.
Yet, other than a couple of perfunctory street scenes, the viewer is denied any real sense of that city (and yes, I know the original was shot in California) or its inhabitants or, really, why Raylan is in town at all. “Justified: City Primeval” could have been set in Dayton or Jacksonville. Not even the homicidal “Oklahoma Wildman” — played with spirit by Boyd Holbrook — is from the city.
The plot revolves around a psychopath, a murdered judge, a notebook filled with the names of crooked officials, a defense lawyer, and the Albanian mob (the less consequential the country, the more menacing its gangsters, apparently.) The bad guy resembles one of those Dixie Mafia thugs Raylan so easily dispensed with in the first series. But honestly, that makes the
