How Justified: City Primeval Was Changed By Gun Violence In America [ATX]
"Justified" is one of my favorite shows. It's a slick, satisfying neo-Western that alternates between the semi-procedural adventures of Kentucky Marshall Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant, never better) and a slow-burn plot about bad dads and the thin line between heroism and villainy. It's also, unfortunately, a show whose entire premise – and title – comes from its law enforcement protagonist's ability to take the law into his own hands, shooting criminals as casually as if he were playing target practice with tin cans. "Justified" both interrogates the trigger-happy Western hero archetype and upholds it, and in 2023, it's certainly an understandably tough sell for new viewers.
This is something that series executive producer Dave Andron seems to be acutely aware of. Ahead of the summer release of "Justified: City Primeval," Andron attended a panel about gun violence and media at the ATX television festival in Austin, where /Film's Ryan Scott was also on the scene. At the panel, Andron spoke at length about the fantasy-like Western violence of 'Justified,' real gun violence in America, and how the show's very first scene — in which Raylan shoots a criminal he goads into "pulling first," then reasons the shooting was 'justified' — has its own complex legacy.
'You think you've been watching this kind of cool gunslinging'
"The conversation since 2009 about gun violence and law enforcement has changed quite a bit," Andron said, noting that while he didn't join the series until halfway through its first season, he knows the show's relationship with gun violence goes back to its pilot episode. "I know that the 'Justified' pilot opens with [Raylan] shooting a guy up on a rooftop in a way that is deemed good shooting or whatever, but it's pretty questionable," Andron recalled. "It does get grounded in character by the end of the pilot, you think you've been watching this kind of cool gunslinging — it's a Western — but at the end his ex-wife kind of calls him out and is like, 'You're the angriest man I've ever known.'"
As "Justified" continued across a consistently stellar six-season run, characters often forced Raylan to grapple with the consequences of his itchy trigger finger, beginning with his reassignment to his Eastern Kentucky hometown district in the wake of the rooftop shooting. Still, Raylan kept shooting and "Justified" often made its shootout scenes look cool, something that Andron says contrasts with his more grounded work on another FX series, "Snowfall." Andron recalls a discussion with executive producer Thomas Schlamme in which the tone of the gun violence in "Snowfall" was established. "It was not cool, it was like, 'this is heartbreaking and sad,' because that's the reality," he told the audience. "When a gun gets pulled and used, it is [bound to be] heartbreaking and sad."
'The conversation evolved over the years'
So how is a character like Raylan Givens meant to grapple with gun violence in 2023, when we see videos of police brutality every day? Without spoiling the new season, Andron says a lot of thought certainly went into the way "Justified: City Primeval" uses guns. "You do try to tie it into the character, but the conversation evolved over the years," he said. He continued:
"We have to take more and more of a look as videos start to come out, these law enforcement shootings, and you're like, 'Holy s***, this is what's been happening all these years.' And it was always happening, we just didn't see it in front of our face so it was easy to ignore. We brought it back this year and did another season of it. The conversations in the writers room were quite a bit different, about how we would approach gun violence, about how he would think about his own gunslinging."
The contradictions and limitations of guns on TV
At the end of the day, though, Andron notes that America's problems with gun violence clearly aren't linked directly to our media consumption, as other countries have all the same shows, films, and video games without the same gun violence problems. "If we had made a show that's didactic or preachy about gun violence, people would have turned it off," he admits, noting that "Justified" is meant as entertainment and fantasy. Still, Andron was surprisingly frank about the moral paradoxes of his job, saying, "It is an interesting contradiction ... to have to go and make a living on shows that feature a lot of violence, and then go home and turn on the news — I have a young child at home — and look at these schools and look at law enforcement videos and feel sick."
From the sound of things, we shouldn't expect Raylan Givens to suddenly holster his weapon for good, a move that wouldn't make sense for his character anyway. Still, it's good to hear that the team behind "Justified: City Primeval" is acutely aware of the show's rocky relationship with gun violence, and that they put a whole lot of thought into how that relationship should evolve in 2023.
"Justified: City Primeval" hits FX on July 18, 2023.