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Justified: City Primeval ★★★½
Disney+
US Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) returns in the limited-series Justified reboot City Primeval.Credit: Chuck Hodes/FX
Returning after eight years, this idiosyncratic police drama gets right back to its menacing, garrulous ways. “Head to the SUV out front,” US Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) urges a desperate fugitive holding a hostage, “instead of the after-life.” Choices are casual and the ramifications extreme in Justified’s askew universe, but for the most part the creatives behind this limited series make the right decisions. Instead of trying to recreate what they had, they segue geographically, domestically, and, to a degree, emotionally.
The revered crime author Elmore Leonard remains the fulcrum, although with some cross-pollination. His stories created the Raylan Givens character, which six previous seasons of Justified used to explore the anarchic twists of eastern Kentucky, but City Primeval is set in Detroit and the 1980 Leonard novel the plot is lifted from doesn’t actually involve Raylan. He’s been subbed in, bringing his cowboy hat north to a predominantly Black city to deliver a fugitive before being added to a task force investigating a failed judicial killing.
Olyphant’s ease with the role, from Raylan’s laconic exasperation and dubious glances to the spurts of temper and gunslinger moves, is a guardrail creators Dave Andron and Michael Dinner can’t jump. As long as he plays the lawman the show stays on track, even if Raylan’s youthful risk-taking has been replaced by silver fox serendipity. He has various Detroit police offsiders, but Raylan’s real partner here is his teenage daughter, Willa (Vivian Olyphant, holding her own opposite her father), whose father-daughter road trip gets side-swiped.
Givens as exasperated dad is a neat twist of the Justified ethos, especially without the presence of Givens’ foil for the six previous seasons, Walton Goggins’ loquacious outlaw Boyd Crowder. The marshal’s new adversary, charming sociopath Clement Mansell (Boyd Holbrook), is both furious and canny – he sees Raylan as an older version of his own unhinged mindset – but the best exchanges are between Raylan and defence attorney Carolyn Wilder (Aunjanue Ellis), who levels him on the witness stand and sparks an attraction.
The old and the new tie together easily, with Leonard’s feel for venal machination and vivid characters who ring true – see Keith David as an ornery judge – slotting into a story where you can see the participants getting cornered or making ill-considered decisions. The absurdity of Justified’s law-breaking now comes with doleful understanding that you can never truly put a burden behind you. There’s a slew of reboots on the way, hopefully they’ll age as appropriately as this one has.
Marcel the Shell with Shoes On ★★★★½
Binge, Netflix
A scene from the Oscar-nominated feature Marcel the Shell with Shoes On.
This mercurial mockumentary is a transporting experience: it creates a tiny world through daffy logic and life-affirming wonder that audiences become invested in. With a chatty hero who really is a shell with shoes on named Marcel, it should be cloying or whimsical. But the way director Dean Fleischer Camp mixes stop-motion animation and live action filmmaking is matched by the storytelling’s fusion – everything gels delightfully.
Camp plays Dean, a disaffected divorcee who discovers that his new rental is already home to the remnants of a shell community: Marcel (voiced by Jenny Slate) and his ageing grandmother, Nan Connie (Isabella Rossellini). Like in Roald Dahl’s Borrowers, the pair ingeniously survive on the fringes of our world. Marcel cares for Nana, but she in turn tries to prepare him for life outside their scaled-down – and increasingly risky – realm.
Nominated for Best Animated Feature at March’s Academy Awards, this feature is the culmination of a handful of Marcel shorts Camp and Slate, collaborators who went through their own divorce, made a decade ago (they’re collected on Camp’s YouTube page). It takes time to find the film’s frequency, but once you do there’s wry humour, technical invention, and heart-wrenching twists. It’s that rare work that speaks naturally, but through different concerns, to both children and adults. What an absolute joy.
Miracle Workers (season 4)
Stan
Miracle Workers, with Geraldine Viswanathan (pictured) and Daniel Radcliffe, returns with a parody of Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.Credit: Stan
This anthology comedy – same cast, different scenario each season – returns with a deadpan satire of Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, as leads Daniel Radcliffe and Geraldine Viswanathan play post-apocalyptic warriors who get married and move into the post-apocalyptic settlement Boomtown. At a tick over 20 minutes the episodes don’t outstay their conceptual welcome, as domesticity and work replace life as the scourge of the wasteland. The show’s third star, Steve Buscemi, returns as a junkshop entrepreneur, although the show has never quite matched his deployment in the debut season as an indifferent god.
Stephen Curry: Underrated
Apple TV+
American basketballer Stephen Curry.Credit: Apple TV+
Firstly, it’s the American basketball star, not the Australian actor, who’s the subject. A long-range shooting savant who changed the physical parameters of the game, Curry comes across as a thoughtful subject in Peter Nicks’ documentary. The focus is his teenage years and college basketball career, where he was consistently written off as being too small to succeed, with framing references to his 2022 season with San Francisco’s Golden State Warriors. There’s little bravado, virtually no famous faces offering hagiographic praise. As authorised sports documentaries go, it’s like Curry himself: dedicated and persistent.
Harley Quinn (season 4)
Binge
A scene from season four of Harley Quinn.
The only DC Comics superhero joint that matters – an animated black comedy about the titular blonde chaos magnet with a baseball bat – returns with a typically pithy season launch that finds both Harley (Kaley Cuoco) and girlfriend Poison Ivy (Lake Bell) trying to make sense of their new work situations. The latter, in particular, gets some deliriously dry lines as she has to sample “idiotic lean-in TikTok” after being put in charge of Gotham’s frat boy villain collection, the Legion of Doom. This series remains a terrific palate cleanser.
Hack My Home
Netflix
Host Ati Williams in the renovation-makeover show Hack My Home.Credit: Netflix
Netflix’s new American renovation reality series is a nimbly agreeable exercise in domestic wish fulfilment: in just 30 minutes, four experts – representing design, engineering, construction and innovation – analyse and solve interior issues revolving around a lack, or simple misuse, of housing space. The whole home gets a spruce, but it’s individual rooms or issues that are addressed. The show has a running joke about the wild ideas of innovator Brooks Atwood, but the finished homes often use expensive hydraulic and mechanical devices and are delivered without a price tag. That’s also pretty wild.
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