The new series picks up several years after the end of the old one. We meet Raylan on a road trip with his daughter (played by real-life daughter Vivian Olyphant). They’re en route to a camp for troubled teens when two carjackers make the mistake of trying to shake them down. In short order, the two would-be criminals are cuffed in the back seat eating fast food, on the way to being delivered to the authorities up in Michigan. Raylan is, as usual, unfailingly polite but also ready to be brutal at the drop of a Stetson. By the end of the episode, he manages to get roped into helping the Detroit PD with a murder investigation. So Raylan is holed up in a local hotel, just like old times, and City Primeval begins.
It’s worth noting that the novel upon which the new series is based does not feature Raylan Givens as a character. This series’ writers simply add him to the existing plot, and it shows a little bit. The murder investigation in this series centers around a killer named Clement Mansell (Boyd Holbrook)—known as “The Oklahoma Wildman”—who is, not coincidentally, another white Southern outsider with a quick trigger. His seemingly consequence-free spree of violence and theft through the city brings the corrupt systems of Detroit to crisis, and so the story is as much about stopping him as it is about understanding why, precisely, he’s so hard to stop.
Boyd Holbrook plays the aforementioned Wildman with try-hard glee, but it’s difficult not to notice that his charisma pales in comparison to that of Olyphant, especially because the show works so hard to pair the two: Mansell repeatedly challenges Givens to a gun duel, as if he were cosplaying his favorite character from his favorite show, Justified. A hallmark of the old Justified was that Raylan was not fundamentally dissimilar from the bad guys he was chasing, even approaching a kind of kinship. Indeed, the show was built around the idea that he and Boyd took opposite paths from the same origin. The Oklahoma Wildman, on the other hand, remains more an annoyance than a true challenger. Holbrook plays a busy void at the center of the show, a chaos agent whose crimes bear little relation to either the place or the people he’s exploiting. His presence only emphasizes the question of what either of these white boys with Southern accents is doing here.