Timothy Olyphant acknowledges that that big Justified: City Primeval twist required "caution"
Olyphant describes the exact feeling he and the miniseries' creators were trying to avoid: "Man, you guys put us through all this just to get to that?”
[Note: This article contains spoilers for the series finale of Justified: City Primeval.]
Now that Justified: City Primeval has wrapped up its 8-episode revival run on FX, some details from its production are starting to come to light. (Most notably interviews with star and executive producer Timothy Olyphant, who appears to have banked quite a bit of interview fodder ahead of the SAG-AFTRA strike in preparation for the show’s rollout.) That includes Olyphant giving his thoughts on the big moments from the show’s finale—and especially that big moment from the finale.
If you’ve seen the episode, you know what you’re talking about: The point where the City Primeval portion of the show’s title fades away a bit, and the Justified asserts itself in full. Foregoing the miniseries’ settings of both Florida and Detroit, the show returns to very familiar territory, a jail in Kentucky, and its most famous (to us) inmate: Boyd Crowder, played by original series co-star Walton Goggins, who wastes very little time executing a prison break that threatens to lure Raylan Givens right back into a life he’d just put down.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Olyphant says that series masterminds Dave Andron and Michael Dinner pitched him on the idea of revisiting Boyd—the original show’s most persistent, and most charismatic, villain, across all 6 seasons on the air—early into the development of City Primeval. “I heard that idea from [showrunners Dave Andron and Michael Dinner] before we started shooting,” Olyphant said. “In fact, that idea of the phone call at the very end, is he gonna pick up? None of this was my idea. The only thing I can pat myself on the back for was knowing it was a good idea when I heard it. ‘That’s a good ending. We can work toward that.’”
But while making it clear that he was excited for returning to one of TV’s great rivalries, Olyphant did note that he had a warning for his collaborators:
I was also cautioning Dave and Michael, “Guys, if you bring Walt back at the very end of this story, you better fucking deliver on the first seven.” Because the worst thing that can happen is the audience feels, when they see Walt, “Man, you guys put us through all this just to get to that?” So it was such a big swing, such a bold idea. I was super excited about it, and I knew Walt was interested. So I was thrilled by it. And it just made us dig deeper on every episode prior. I said, “You can’t end it like it feels like a layup, like we’re apologizing for something, right?” Having now seen it all, I feel like if we were so lucky to come back in some way, I am just as excited to bring back characters from the original show as I am characters from this incarnation. I feel like the writers did an amazing job of making everybody feel like they’re part of the same world.