It’s been over eight years since FX’s Justified wrapped, and it’s about to return with a new spinoff miniseries, Justified: City Primeval. According to co-showrunner Michael Dinner, one surprising figure is partially responsible for the revival: Quentin Tarantino.
In an interview with IndieWire, Dinner explained that the original idea for Justified: City Primeval was to make an entirely new series based on the book of the same name by Elmore Leonard. Previously, Tarantino had toyed with making his own adaptation of the story, but opted to take on Leonard’s Rum Punch instead (which became 1997’s Jackie Brown). When the director was working with Justified star Timothy Olyphant on Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood and heard about the potential series, though, the two started talking and hatched the idea for it to be a spinoff of Justified.
Dinner liked Tarantino and Olyphant’s idea, but wasn’t sure it would be logistically possible. So, when he spoke to FX about the pitch, he put the ball in the network’s court. “They said, ‘What are you thinking about doing?’” Dinner told IndieWire. “I said, ‘Are you familiar with City Primeval?’ They said, ‘Yeah, Tim pitched that to us a year ago.’ I said, ‘Well, let me pitch it to you as its own thing, and you tell me if you want to do it as its own thing or as a season of Justified.’” Of course, FX “loved” the pitch, and the show was solidified as a Justified revival.
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That marked the end of Tarantino’s contributions to Justified: City Primeval (it was confirmed that he did not direct any episodes, despite murmurs that he would). But it also marked the beginning of a big undertaking for the show’s cast and crew: bringing together the worlds of City Primeval and Justified’s Deputy US Marshall Raylan Givens, who doesn’t appear in the book. “We were a little worried about it, to tell you the truth,” Dinner said. “[The book] was a kind of crown jewel, and we didn’t want to do a disservice to it… We catapulted Raylan into this story and let it evolve.”
Justified: City Primeval will begin airing episodes on July 18th, 2023 at 10:00 p.m. ET/PT on FX, and episodes will become available the next day on Hulu. In our review, Consequence contributor Marcus Shorter called the series satisfying, writing: “Showrunners David Andron, Michael Dinner, and many others from the original Justified team did the impossible — they continued their hit show without betraying its legacy and, more importantly, told a compelling story that felt necessary for the characters and the audience.”
As for Tarantino, he’s busy working on his final film, The Movie Critic, which he explained is based on “a guy who really lived, but was never really famous, and he used to write movie reviews for a porno rag.” Check out our definitive ranking of Tarantino’s films here.
