It was easy to be more than a touch concerned that the return of Justified, eight years after its season 6 finale in 2015, would be a bad idea. We’ve seen reboots and revivals of old series not work plenty of times, but thankfully, Justified: City Primeval, is actually quite good so far.

There are few characters more universally beloved than Timothy Olyphant’s Raylan Givens, the smooth-talking US Marshall with an eternal rivalry with Walton Goggins’ Boyd Crowder.

Now, Crowder is gone (for now) and Olyphant finds himself in Detroit pursuing a new villain, Boyd Holbrook’s Clement Mansell, a psychopathic robber and killer who is murdering his way around the city, including his killing of a judge in a road rage/carjacking incident. You may remember Holbrook from his recent role as The Corinthian in Netflix’s The Sandman or the guy hunting down Wolverine in Logan. He’s not Boyd Crowder at this point, but he feels like a worthy foe to Raylan.

It's certainly a risk to replace essentially the entire supporting cast of Justified like this, but Olyphant, so far, is able to carry the series himself, with the added twist of his teenage daughter tagging along for the ride. Olyphant is now silver-haired but he has not lost a step, and slides back into the Raylan role flawlessly, the part he seems to have been born to play. Even his part on The Mandalorian as Cobb Vanth felt like he was trying to recreate Raylan in space.

Justified: City Primeval will run for eight weekly episodes this year. It’s being pitched as a miniseries, but I do wonder if it does big numbers (in addition to its high critic scores) if it may stick around for more. I know I’d watch an infinite number of seasons, especially if they figure out a way to bring Boyd back (and my guess is somehow, they will).

The overall takeaway is that if you’re a Justified fan and have been missing that series, that this reboot/sequel/whatever you want to call it is going to scratch that itch just fine. We may only be two episodes in but it has recreated at least some spark of the magic of the original series, even if Olyphant so far is the only surviving cast member. We’ll see how it develops in the next six episodes.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.