What does it mean when a show that ends perfectly decides to come back?

Ever since FX announced it was bringing back TV’s coolest lawman, Raylan Givens, for the Justified revival City Primeval, this question has nagged at me. The original series, a backcountry noir set in the hollers of Harlan, Kentucky, and based on Elmore Leonard’s short story “Fire in the Hole,” is an all-timer. Over six seasons, it examined how to reckon with your past with nuance and a refreshing lack of sentiment, and its writing and powder-dry sense of humor both channeled Leonard’s voice and made it its own. On top of that, the series finale, which aired in 2015, didn’t just stick the landing—as a piece of writing, acting, and directing, it’s a thing of wonder. So, while you could argue that more Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (played with low-key brilliance by Timothy Olyphant) is never a bad thing, bringing him back for another go-round is a risk. Justified succeeded in telling the story it set out to tell. Why undo that just to see Raylan put on his ten-gallon hat one more time?

TV series finales are hard, by definition. Unlike movies, successful TV shows are supposed to keep spinning storylines, to keep getting renewed season after season. Although the era of streaming has changed the formula somewhat—a complete series is more valuable to some streamers than a long-running one is, especially since payments to creative personnel increase in later seasons—an early ending is still seen as a sign of defeat. But ending a show after a long, well-respected run presents a different set of problems. How do you honor the characters audiences have grown to love while also moving the story forward? Justified pulled this off, in a final scene between Raylan and his childhood-friend-slash-nemesis Boyd Crowder that delivered on the complex themes of the show with beauty and restraint.

It was also satisfying. Finales like the Sopranos’ infamous cut to black can earn our respect while still leaving us shrieking, but Justified’s ending brought that rarest of things—closure. It had two parts, one that took place in the present day of the show and one five years later, but the time jump wasn’t the pretext for some wrap-up montage, a crutch so many finales fall back on. (Even the once-mighty Game of Thrones, which lived to upend audience expectations, concluded with a chord-swelling pastiche.) It was the end of the story Justified set out to tell, a final look at the question of whether it was possible for the sons of Kentucky coal country to ever escape their origins—or whether, as Boyd put it, “the only way to get out of our town alive is to never’ve been born there.”

City Primeval, set in Detroit, is smart enough to bring back only Raylan, not Boyd or the rest of the Harlan cast, so it’s more spinoff than sequel, but it’s still a gamble. Raylan is loaned out to a Motor City task force after an attempt on a judge’s life, and when Raylan protests—he’s supposed to take his 15-year-old daughter on a road trip back to Miami—the police chief shuts him down with “Sometimes it takes an angry white guy to catch an angry white guy.” It’s a ham-handed line, far too on the nose for Justified, but it also acknowledges the complexity of bringing back 2015’s Raylan in 2023. Raylan’s anger—a central theme of the original series, in which Raylan’s ex-wife Winona tells him that, while he hides it well, “you’re the angriest man I have ever known”—may read differently now, especially in a majority Black city like Detroit. And while this anger, at his being born in Harlan, at his mother’s dying when he was young, and at his father’s life of crime, is the engine that drives him to bring terrible people to justice, it’s also what got him sent back to Harlan from Miami in the first place. Raylan challenged and gunned down a cartel killer who had tortured a man to death while making Raylan watch, rather than bring him in alive.

Justified didn’t avoid the subject of race in its original run, but it was more interested in examining class and socioeconomics, and how your past and background shape you. The standout Season 2 looked at a town both exploited and hollowed out by the shrinking of its main industry, coal mining, but it avoided pat sentiment with a fierceness that took you aback. Raylan’s antagonist, Mags Bennett (played by an extraordinary Margo Martindale), exploited this history for her own ends, and while you weren’t supposed to feel sorry for these characters, you were supposed to understand them. (For all the genuflecting over Hillbilly Elegy as some sort of code to crack the Trump voter, Justified would have been a better place to start.)

In Justified’s universe, the greatest sin was not being a villain; it was being an asshole. The show loved underdogs and detested swagger. In one of its funniest scenes, Patton Oswalt’s Constable Bob bests the mob killer Yolo, mainly because Yolo is so caught off guard that Bob doesn’t fold like a wet noodle during an interrogation. “People underestimate Bob at their peril,” Raylan says later. The same could be said of the show.

As the magnetic poles of the show, Raylan and Boyd also shared this history, as well as other parallels—they were both smart, and both grew up with abusive criminals as fathers. While one became a U.S. Marshal and one became an outlaw, Justified made no bones about the fact that both ended up in a profession in which they kill people. In their youth, they’d dug coal together and escaped a mine-shaft cave-in, and that bond of place and time resonated differently than the bonds between kin, or colleagues, or romantic partners. It’s a bond Boyd and Rayland worked hard to sever over the course of the series, as antagonists who under other circumstances might have killed each other several times over, but their last scene together shows how they’ve learned to honor their shared history without letting it pull them under.

Boyd wasn’t supposed to make it out of Justified’s pilot alive, but Walton Goggins’ performance was such a revelation that the writers wrote him back in. As for Olyphant, he’s had a startling, magnetic screen presence ever since Doug Liman’s Go, an understated charisma that creates a rare chemistry—with Ian McShane in Deadwood and Goggins in Justified—that subverts the usual “good guy vs. bad guy” tropes.

Every piece of this history comes to bear on their final scene. Earlier in the finale, Raylan brings Boyd in alive, surprising them both—Boyd refuses to pull on Raylan and go out in a hail of bullets, and Raylan does not force him to. So, when Raylan comes to visit Boyd in jail five years later, traveling all the way from Miami to Kentucky, Boyd laughs and greets him. “I know you have never believed a word that comes out of my mouth,” he says, “though I have harbored a secret hope that you have nevertheless enjoyed it.”

Raylan tells Boyd that Ava, Boyd’s ex-fiancée, is dead. It’s a lie—Raylan is protecting Ava, who became an informant for Raylan against Boyd before burning them both, and is now raising a son Boyd doesn’t know exists. But what follows is the most honest exchange the two men have ever had.

After processing the news, Boyd asks Raylan if he can ask him one more question. “You’re asking why I came?” Raylan says, and tells Boyd he thought that it was news that should be delivered in person. But Boyd presses. “After all these long years, Raylan Givens, that’s the only reason?” Raylan pauses. “Well, I suppose if I allow myself to be sentimental, despite all that has occurred, there is one thing I wander back to.”

“We dug coal together,” Boyd says.

“That’s right.”’

Raylan has been trying to leave Harlan behind his whole life—emotionally, geographically—and so this moment, when he honors that past as a bond rather than a symbol of all he has tried to escape, is perhaps as satisfying an ending you can have for a show that refuses to flatten or simplify the human heart. It’s an exchange that understands that the past ceases to have power over you only after you acknowledge it, rather than deny it.

Stories are meant to end, and that’s a good thing. That’s why the stakes for bringing back Justified feel so high. And while City Primeval still channels Justified’s distinct tone—after a Detroit detective boasts that they need just one guard dog now because this new breed “is like a German shepherd on steroids,” Raylan says, “What if you have three guys running in three different directions?”—there’s also a fish-out-of-water vibe.

It’s one that the revival knows not to push too hard—although Raylan can make bad decisions and be impulsive, he can’t be ridiculous—but it still makes me nervous. Watching him return, for me, is a bit like how a teenager might look at a once-adored, impossibly cool uncle who they’re worried might become cringe.

The worst fate, which I do not think will become Justified’s, but that hangs over all reboots like a specter, is that of Sex and the City. I can’t even watch And Just Like That … because SATC still means something to me as a show. Although the criticisms about lack of representation in the original series are completely valid, they skim over the fact that when the show first aired, its depiction of thirtysomething, unmarried women who were focused on friendship, careers, and navigating financial independence was itself a radical act. Now, in large part because of the dismal sequels and infinitesimal stakes of the reboot, Sex and the City is seen as a fluffy guilty pleasure, not, as Emily Nussbaum put it in her definitive piece, as a peer of The Sopranos, which it used to be. As much as I want to think of only the original series as canon, the reboot cannot be unseen, unmade. AJLT lives alongside Sex and the City now and affects the way we watch it.

To be clear, City Primeval, at least in its early episodes, is not making those same mistakes, and I will continue to watch it. But there’s a subtler loss. For Raylan, his goodbye to Boyd is no longer the end of his story, and that will change forever how I feel about the original series. Because as much as I love Justified, I was ready to say goodbye too.