Netflix Western American Primeval Squanders A Fascinating Historical Moment

Hollywood and the TV industry have long been obsessed with carrying on the myth of the Old American West, from pulpy adventures rife with six-shooters, more self-serious meditations on the United States’ bloodstained history, and everything in between. American Primeval, Netflix’s newest limited series, steps into this long line of Westerns, attempting to ground us in the unsavory details of the mostly-forgotten Utah War, an 1857 conflict between the United States government and Mormon settlers that went to some grim places. But despite a novel historical backdrop and some impressive production value, this mini-series is undone by thin characters, predictable plotlines, and an inability to thoughtfully engage with its abundant violence. It has plenty of shock value but little else, and had me wishing I could ride off into the sunset long before the credits rolled.

The story centers on two groups trying to make their way west during a time of great political tension between the US government and Utah’s Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. We primarily follow Sara Holloway (Betty Gilpin) and her son Devin (Preston Mota), who are on a journey to reunite with Sara’s estranged husband. Unfortunately for them, the path there is made up of hazardous winter terrain and lots of people who want to kill each other. And then there’s Abish (Saura Lightfoot-Leon) and Jacob Pratt (Dane DeHaan), two recently hitched Mormon settlers headed to the LDS settlement in Utah, whose relationship seems to be on thin ice. Before long, both parties are embroiled in conspiracies and manhunts related to the Mountain Meadows Massacre, a real-world mass killing perpetrated by Mormon milia members against California-bound settlers, as a whole bunch of people end up six feet under.

If American Primeval has a thesis statement, it’s that the American West was a place of depravity and lawlessness, as reflected in the endless and somewhat exhausting explosions of bloodshed that director Peter Berg (Battleship, Hancock, Lone Survivor) bombards us with. It’s not exactly fresh territory for the genre, but worse than simply being unoriginal, these attempts at human darkness always come across as clumsy and cartoonish rather than compelling and “adult” in the way it’s going for. Yes, there’s no shortage of shootings, stabbings, beatings, child murder, lashings, scalpings, sexual violence, pearly leg bones emerging from shattered limbs, and just about every horrible thing you can imagine. But it all feels more gratuitous than thought-provoking because, despite this focus on brains getting bashed in and throats being slit, the series simply doesn’t have anything unique or revealing to say about violence, instead believing that simply depicting these horrible acts is enough to be convincing.

It also certainly doesn’t help that the series pales in comparison to the movie it’s most directly aping, Iñárritu’s The Revenant, a connection that feels all the more difficult to ignore given that the two projects share a screenwriter in Mark L. Smith. While that film is as subtle in its intentions as a wild bear attack, it feels positively restrained compared to this work, which lacks any sense of slow-build, quietude, or contemplation, instead assaulting us with one shoot-out after the next. It’s a problem best summed up by a showy sequence shot in the first episode that’s directly trying to channel cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki’s work on The Revenant and his other films like Children of Men but that comes across as garishly over-the-top imitation; with nary an ounce of gravitas or pathos, it’s like a more expensive version of action figures being mashed around. And it also doesn’t help that Berg’s direction frequently feels more distracting than engaging, full of strange, off-kilter camera framings that don’t match the tone of a given scene.

Beyond some strange visual choices, one of the main reasons it’s difficult to care about all these bloody happenings is that most of the characters involved come across as derivative archetypes. There’s Isaac (Taylor Kitsch), an outdoorsman helping Sara and her son survive their trip westward who plays like a mixture of a classic laconic gunslinger and Dunbar from Dances with Wolves. His emotional arc is as flat as it is predictable. While there is more to our protagonist, Sara, than initially appears, her journey is as inelegantly and tactlessly presented as the rest of the story, putting her through horrible events without giving her enough room to grow as a character. Even worse, I have no idea what we’re supposed to take away from Jacob Pratt’s story besides clumsily portrayed “madness,” and his wife Abish doesn’t fare much better. The extended cast is largely made up of scowling homesteaders and other one-note, trigger-happy fiends, and even many of the more interesting side characters, like Jim Bridger, an owner of a frontier fort played to salty perfection by Shea Whigham, sort of fade out of the picture with minimal resolution.

Similarly, the more interesting of the two plotlines, the one that concerns political machinations around the Mormon church and the fallout of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, has an entirely lackluster conclusion that makes it feel the writers didn’t have a great way to tie real-world events to fictional ones. After lots of setup, political maneuvering, and deception, you’re left to browse Wikipedia to find out the resolution. Perhaps most condemning is that as we’re left with scorched Earth and mountains of dead bodies, it becomes clear that this series doesn’t have much to say about the past beyond, “Wow, history sure was violent,” and even some of the more interesting ideas teased at, like how women were brutally marginalized during this time period, don’t receive particularly well-considered send-offs.

American Primeval is very in line with many streaming offerings these days: at a glance, it looks expensive, it features solid performances by experienced actors, and it offers a much darker take on its chosen genre than what you’d see in broadcast TV. But despite these superficial superlatives, there just isn’t much more to grasp onto beyond that. The characters are lackluster, the plotting is a mess, and despite gesturing towards America’s great history of violence, it does virtually nothing with these weighty ideas. The result is a series that looks the part but not much else, another entry in this increasingly gilded age of television.

Elijah Gonzalez is an assistant Games and TV Editor for Paste Magazine. In addition to playing and watching the latest on the small screen, he also loves film, creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Twitter @eli_gonzalez11 and on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.

For all the latest TV news, reviews, lists and features, follow @Paste_TV.