Quentin Taran­ti­no sad­dles up for TV with a guest-direct­ing gig on Justified

Once Upon a Time in Hol­ly­wood was in many ways famed cinephile Quentin Taran­ti­no​’s valen­tine to TV, focus­ing on cow­boy seri­als and action week­lies rather than the glitzy block­busters more close­ly iden­ti­fied with the enter­tain­ment indus­try. Now, the direc­tor is going to prove that he’s not all talk by direct­ing a small-screen West­ern instead of doing so sec­ond­hand under the pre­tence of mak­ing a movie around it.

Dead­line has the exclu­sive that Taran­ti­no is in talks to take the director’s chair on an episode or two of Jus­ti­fied: City Primeval, the lim­it­ed-series reboot of FX’s wide­ly acclaimed oater that ran from 2010 to 2015. If this does indeed come to pass, it’ll be his first time back on TV since direct­ing an episode of CSI: Crime Scene Inves­ti­ga­tion in 2005. (His oth­er direc­to­r­i­al TV cred­its include a fan-favorite episode of ER in 1995.)

As an adap­ta­tion of Elmore Leonard’s writ­ing, the mate­r­i­al is a nat­ur­al match for Taran­ti­no, who used Leonard’s nov­el Rum Punch as the basis for his own Jack­ie Brown. On top of that, Taran­ti­no tapped Jus­ti­fied lead Tim­o­thy Olyphant for Once Upon a Time in Hol­ly­wood, and cast him in a sher­iff role not far removed from the show’s hard-bit­ten US Mar­shal Ray­lan Givens.

The upcom­ing series’ plot syn­op­sis pro­vid­ed by Dead­line fore­tells a return to its dark clas­si­cism: ​“The show returns to Givens’ sto­ry eight years after he left Ken­tucky and now is based in Mia­mi, bal­anc­ing life as a mar­shal and part-time father of a 14-year-old girl. A chance encounter on a Flori­da high­way sends him to Detroit, where he cross­es paths with Clement Mansell, aka The Okla­homa Wild­man, a vio­lent sociopath who’s already slipped through the fin­gers of Detroit’s finest once and wants to do so again.”

This could be a sat­is­fac­to­ry stopover while we patient­ly await Tarantino’s tenth – and as he would have us believe, final – fea­ture project. Though it’s also pos­si­ble that this could go the way of his much-teased Star Trek treat­ment, now an impos­si­ble dream that will nev­er see the light of day.