Timothy Olyphant in Justified
In yet another alarming incidence of real-world violence encroaching upon fictionalized law enforcement, the Justified revival was forced to shut down production on Wednesday night when two cars engaged in a gun battle crashed through the set’s barricades, according to Variety.
Filming for Justified: City Primeval was taking place in Chicago near Douglass Park when the shooting occurred. No cast or crew members were hurt in the upsetting event; star Timothy Olyphant was reportedly among those present at the location. According to The Hollywood Reporter, production remained shut down on Thursday and Friday and is slated to resume next week.
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This is the second time this week alone that an outside shooting has affected television production. On Tuesday, a crew member for Law & Order: Organized Crime lost his life on set of the show in Brooklyn, New York. 31-year-old Johnny Pizarro, a parking enforcement officer, was shot in his car 45 minutes before filming was set to take place on the block.
The industry is still reckoning with the infamous Rust shooting that occurred in October 2021, when apparent disorganization on set led to a gun being held by actor Alec Baldwin discharging a live round, resulting in the death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.
Certainly a stark difference from the outside shootings that have disrupted other Hollywood sets. But given the haphazard way that live rounds reportedly made it onto that production, perhaps it all falls under the same uniquely American umbrella of excessive and continuous gun violence.
That it has affected the entertainment industry in such direct ways recently may be coincidence, but the constant threat of attack by firearms is so deeply woven into the country’s DNA that it’s a regular feature of the very productions that were interrupted. Perhaps there’s some meta commentary to be mined there, but suffice to say it would be preferable to live in a society where people’s lives were not always in danger of being irrevocably changed by guns while doing their jobs.
