Justified: City Primeval showrunner teases that Raylan Givens could die

I am certainly ready for the return of Raylan Givens in Justified: City Primeval, but could this be the last time we see our favourite marshal? As Justified: City Primeval is being billed as a limited series, showrunner Dave Andron told Entertainment Weekly that the stakes are high enough that Raylan Givens might not make it out alive.

“If you’re bringing Raylan back, you put him up against a really, really bad guy who doesn’t have any problem killing people, because Raylan could die,” Dave Andron said. “This is a limited [series] and Raylan could very well not make it out of this. Every season we ended the show with ‘You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive,’ but then he does. Right up until the end of the show, you know Raylan’s not going to die, and obviously he did not at the end. But I think, at this point, all bets are off.” Raylan cheated death time and time again in the original series, but Justified: City Primeval will give him a very formidable adversary with Clement Mansell, aka The Oklahoma Wildman.

“This character is one of the best bad guys Elmore ever created,” fellow showrunner Michael Dinner said. “He’s just a really dangerous, cool, bad motherf—er. Now, Boyd was those things too, but Boyd and Raylan were cut from the same cloth. Clement, he’s really unpredictable.” Boyd Holbrook plays Clement and explained how his character is different from Raylan’s previous frenemy, Boyd Crowder. “Boyd Crowder kind of supported Raylan, really; they needed each other,” Holbrook said. “But these guys, Raylan and Clement, they’re trying to get away from each other. Clement is kind of a walking calamity, way in over his head. He’s a thief, but not really a great thief. This guy sucks the life out of every moment as if it’s going to be his last. He’s really unstoppable in his own way. He also thinks he’s such hot s—. His ego is just out of control. He’s a sociopath. There are no F’s given with him.“

Michael Dinner explained that while Justified: City Primeval features Timothy Olyphant reprising his role, it’s really an all-new show. “We didn’t intend to reboot Justified, we didn’t intend to pick up where we left off, but we thought it would be interesting to, what I call, ‘do a mashup,’” Dinner explained “What if we took our character and dropped him into the middle of this story, and yet pay homage to a character that was in the book and also do service to the book? It wasn’t so much trying to recapture the past, but to recapture the feeling that we had working together in the past, so we took Raylan and put him into this story.” Justified: City Primeval will premiere on FX this July.