Justified is returning to the small screen in 2023, and a big Hollywood name helped the revival become a reality. Director Quentin Tarantino had some interest in adapting Elmore Leonard’s 1980 City Primeval novel into a movie. A conversation with Timothy Olyphant on the set of the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood feature film ultimately led to Olyphant reprising his role as the lawman.

In the upcoming Justified: City Primeval series, viewers will see U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (Olyphant) head to Detroit after living a quieter life in Miami for a decade. Aunjanue Ellis, Boyd Holbrook, Adelaide Clemens, Vondie Curtis Hall, and Vivian Olyphant also star.

Justified showrunner Michael Dinner said the following about the evolution of the new FX series, per Entertainment Weekly:

“A lot of people had wanted to make this book before. It almost got made by [Sam] Peckinpah years ago as a movie, and [Quentin] Tarantino wanted to make it as a movie, and a lot of people wanted to play with it in television, streaming or cable. We had a great experience doing Justified, and some years later Elmore’s son had approached me about doing it as its own thing. I’d always loved the book, we always referenced it when we were in the writers’ room on the original series, and so that was the intention: It was going to be its own thing.

And then one day the phone rang and it was Tim Olyphant who said, “I’ve been sitting on the set with Quentin, and we were talking about this book, City Primeval. We thought it would make a great year of Justified.” So we started kicking around the idea, and FX was into it. It was very complicated to put together because the rights situation was a little murky — part of the rights belonged to the estate, part belonged to MGM which was going to make this movie several times, and it took a while to get it going, but then we did.

We had a great time for seven years on this show, and so the real intention was what if we did a long movie, a limited series, that’s not really trying to go back for the past with Justified, but to do a mashup between this book and this character that we loved, and not to revisit the past as much as we looked at this character as if he had three chapters in his life, and this is the second chapter. We catapulted him into this story, and Dave and I like to say that the road in front of him is a lot shorter than the road behind. He’s at a state in his life where he is this walking anachronism, and can this guy survive in a world that’s not the same world that he’s used to? And the world’s changed politically, sociologically, and he’s changed as a man, and that’s where we find him.”

Justified: City Primeval will arrive at some point in the summer of 2023.

What do you think? Are you excited about the return of Justified to FX? Would you like the see the show return as a regular series?