When FX recently announced the premiere date of the Justified: City Primeval limited series starring Timothy Olyphant, many of us prepared to clear our calendar on July 18, order a pizza, grab a beverage and a big bowl of popcorn for an all-day binge of eight one hour episodes.
Well, hold your Stetsons, this isn’t The Bear. FX is not going to drop all eight episodes at once. They’re going to release the series the old fashioned way — one week at a time. With the exception of the premiere date, when episodes 1 & 2 will be released, the eight episode series will air over the course of seven weeks. So let’s get these dates blocked on your calendar.
Here are the names and airdates of the eight, hour-long episodes for the first, and presumably only season of the limited series, Justified: City Primeval
July 18, 2023
Episode 1 City Primeval
Episode 2 The Oklahoma Wildman
July 25, 2023
Episode 3 Backstabbers
August 1, 2023
Episode 4 Kokomo
August 8, 2023
Episode 5 You Good?
August 15, 2023
Episode 6 Adios
August 22, 2023
Episode 7 The Smoking Gun
August 29, 2023
Episode 8 The Question
After a long hot summer of filming the Chicago-made series on the stages of Chicago Studio City and on location in some of the sketchier areas of town, you will be hard pressed to be able to identify our city. You won’t see the L, or Chicago Theatre marquee, or the familiar skyline. The series was filmed in Chicago but the story is set in Detroit.
It seemed to take an unusually long time for FX to announce the airdate, but it is certain to be worth the wait. The Justified spinoff, continues the story, taking inspiration from the Elmore Leonard novel City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit. Starring Timothy Olyphant in his reprised role as Deputy US Marshall Raylan Givens takes us forward 15 years.
Having left the hollers of Kentucky, Raylan Givens now lives in Miami, a walking anachronism balancing his life as a U.S. Marshal and part-time father of a 15-year-old girl. His hair is grayer, his hat is dirtier, and the road in front of him is suddenly a lot shorter than the road behind.
A chance encounter on a desolate Florida highway sends him to Detroit. There he crosses paths with Clement Mansell, aka The Oklahoma Wildman, a violent, sociopathic desperado who’s already slipped through the fingers of Detroit’s finest once and aims to do so again. Mansell’s lawyer, formidable Motor City native Carolyn Wilder, has every intention of representing her client, even as she finds herself caught in between cop and criminal, with her own game afoot as well. These three characters set out on a collision course in classic Elmore Leonard fashion, to see who makes it out of the City Primeval alive.
Dave Andron and Michael Dinner are showrunners and will serve as executive producers with Timothy Olyphant, Graham Yost, Sarah Timberman, Carl Beverly, Taylor Elmore, Chris Provenzano and V.J. Boyd. Peter Leonard of the Elmore Leonard Estate executive produced in association with MGM Television. Walter Mosley and Ingrid Escajeda are consulting producers, and Eisa Davis is a producer.
Justified: City Primeval is produced by Sony Pictures Television and FX Productions.
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Wielding decades of Film & TV production experience, Barbara Roche is the editor/publisher of Reel Chicago and Reel 360
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