ATX TV Festival Co-Founders on How ‘Justified: City Primeval’ and ‘Mayans M.C.’ Bring the Festival Full-Circle

The opening night of this year’s ATX TV Festival kicked off with the premiere of the much-anticipated Justified: City Primeval.

Ahead of the premiere, we caught up with the co-founders of the festival, Emily Gipson and Caitlin McFarland, to talk about this year’s festival, how the Writers Strike impacted this year’s programming, and why Justified: City Primeval and Mayans M.C. bring the festival full-circle. (You can watch the full interview below.)

“We started the festival with writers and we have very strong relationships with them, and we really respect them and the WGA. And so the pivot we had was really to kind of see what was safe and comfortable for them, and how could we still include them with the things being asked of them from the WGA and from the strike, and from the needs that they had. And so it is a little bit of ‘church and state’ separation, but we have places for writers to talk about writing, for writers to talk about the strike, and to give them a platform to do that,” McFarland said about the strike.

“I think the fact that we were able to find a line to do that while still also premiering new shows and still having studio and network partners, and helping promote new series because we need to watch them so that we can get more of them — I think that was the fine line to walk,” McFarland continued. “But once we found it, it felt really good that people wanted to partake in both sides of that.”

Watch the interview with Emily Gipson and Caitlin McFarland:

Gipson and McFarland also each shared what festival events they were personally excited about this year, and both of those events are ones that bring the festival full circle.

“Justified means a whole lot to us. We had it when it was a current series. We had it last year as a writers room reunion. We now have the new version of it that has a lot of the same creatives from it. We get to get Timothy Olyphant down here, which we have not gotten before. So we have Raylan Givens and I am just — to do a red carpet, world premiere of a new series and have it be one that’s so intertwined with the festival, it’s just really thrilling,” McFarland said.

 “We premiered the first 10-15 minutes of Mayans M.C. a couple of years ago, and to be here for its end, because it’s ending soon. And to have a panel on its end is also — we like full circles,” Gipson said. “Which, now that we’ve been around long enough to have that, to have the beginning and the end of the something, and then to start doing reunions of things have been over since we started, it’s really fun to see.”

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*Additional reporting by Cade Taylor.

Check out all of our coverage of the ATX Television Festival right here. There is a lot more to come!

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