TV Review: "American Primeval"

The new Netflix series is an unrelentingly grim and punishing look at live in the American West of the 1850s, one devoid of much hope or human magic.

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Warning: Full spoilers for the series follow.

As regular readers of this newsletter know, I’ve long been fascinated by the ways that popular culture imagines (and sometimes distorts) the past. I’m especially drawn to popular fictions that aim to do something new, and so it’s understandable that I would be drawn to Netflix’s American Primeval. The series is very much a revisionist western and, like its predecessors in the genre, it seeks to strip away the platitudes and the moral certainties of the genre. In that sense, it succeeds at what seems to be its goal, making it one of the more scathing revisionist westerns of recent memory. It’s also a grim and dreadful slog of a series that would probably have been just bearable as a film but is almost unwatchable as a TV series. Six episodes is just a lot of time to spend in a series that is so relentlessly grim, violent, and brutal, one with little hope or optimism to offer.

A bit of plot summary. Betty Gilpin stars as Sara (either Holloway or Rowell) who, along with her young son Devin (Preston Mota) are trying to meet up with her husband, while also avoiding arrest for a murder Sara committed back east. They cross paths with both a mute Indigenous woman named Two Moons (Shawnee Pourier) and frontiersman Isaac Reed (Taylor Kitsch), the latter of whom is the typical brooding western antihero. Sara’s journey takes place against the broader backdrop of the Utah war, which sees various other characters engage in horrendous acts of violence (or die by them), including Mormon couple Jacob Pratt (Dane DeHaan) and Abish (Saura Lightfoot-Leon). By the end of the series only a handful of the characters that we’ve been introduced to remain alive, including Sara who, at the very least gets to set out on a life on her own terms.

It’s safe to say that this is one of the most depressing and grim things that I’ve seen in recent memory. It makes series like Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon look positively sunny by comparison. People are shot (with both bullets and arrows) and scalped and strangled. Everything and everyone is muddy and grimy and dirty and unpleasant, and there are very few characters who have any redeeming characteristics and those that do usually end up dead. Captain Edmund Dellinger (Lucas Neff), for example, spends his time in the show writing in a diary (highly reminiscent of the conceit of Dances with Wolves, one of the many films that this series alludes to) and showing how upright and honorable he is, only to be gunned down by a group of ruthless Mormons.

So much for chivalry.

The central problem of American Primeval is that it becomes so focused on its gritty and bleak view of the American West that it too often forgets that in order to be a truly successful TV series you have to have characters that the viewer even cares about. Its limited runtime and numerous plotlines make it impossible to really get attached to anyone, a problem made worse by the series’ tendency to off a character with little to no warning. While this is arguably in service to the series’ larger point about life in the American West–that it was nasty, brutish, and short–it does make for tedious watching. Why bother getting excited or interested in what happens to characters when you know that you have only six episodes to spend with them and they’re likely to die a horrible death anyway? It doesn’t help that even the heroes, Gilpin and Kitsch, give mostly wooden performances (this is particularly true of the latter).

One can’t even say that its villains are particularly well-developed. Kim Coates is both oily and intensely terrifying as Brigham Young, but many times he reads more as a stock villain out of a melodrama than as a true religious leader committed to his people and their spiritual and physical well-being. This is of a piece with the series’ overall treatment of the Mormons, who emerge from the series as a group of bigoted villains who are more than willing to destroy one of their own number so long as doing so means that their crimes won’t be revealed.

That being said, there were a few things that I found genuinely pleasurable. Shea Whigham is a true delight as Jim Bridger, the owner of the fort that bears his name. He’s just the right mix of hard-bitten and ornery, and he takes a particular delight in defying the Mormons and their fire-breathing leader. Young might be a stereotype of a zealot, but Coates gives his all to the performance, as Derek Hinkey as Red Feather, the leader of a band of Shoshone who rain down death wherever they go. There’s an intensity to Hinkey in particular that is fitting for a man who has had to see his people slaughtered and forcibly removed from their lands.

Visually, the series oscillates between some gorgeous shots of the American West–it was filmed largely in New Mexico–and a washed-out palette that drains what little vitality is left of the story. I’m not sure who originated the idea that desaturating something makes it more “serious,” but I sincerely wish that we would put that notion to bed once and for all. The score, on the other hand, is rock-heavy and, while it takes some getting used to, I found myself actually enjoying the sense of doom that it created at some key moments.

Ultimately, American Primeval does for American history what Game of Thrones did for medieval Europe. In essence, the series argues that the United States has always been and probably always will be a land with blood mixed into its foundations. This is made abundantly clear time and again, no more so than when Dellinger’s musing on his desire for peace is interrupted by a Mormon raid that sees him shot in the head, his body left to rot. Arguably even more tragic is the moment when Jacob, driven mad by grief and his grievous injury, ends shooting and killing Abish, the woman whom he has spent so much time trying to find. In the world as this series presents it, there can be no hope or happy ending, no peace that isn’t marred by tragedy, death, and bloodshed. This lasts right up until the end, when Seth ends up getting fatally shot right after sharing a kiss with Sara.

I’m not saying that every pop culture fiction about our past has to be celebratory or uplifting, but I do find it taxing when a series remains so indebted to its own bleak cynicism that it never lets up or gives you a sense that something good might happen. At least there is some glimmer of happiness in the conclusion of Sara’s story, which sees her riding off with Devin and Two Moons into a new life in California, one that isn’t chained or limited by the events of the past. It’s a brief moment of happiness in a series that is otherwise more interested in human suffering than the triumph of the spirit. Moreover, since we’ve already seen how committed Mormons and other White people are to the destruction of the Shoshone, and since we already know the outcome of history, there is little hope to be had even in this somewhat happy ending. As Abish remarks to one of the Shoshone leaders, the White people will never stop until they are destroyed.

American primeval, indeed.