Sometimes you wanna go where nobody knows your name. Let’s say, for example, you’re an East Coast society type fleeing the big city with your child in tow after murdering your abusive husband. Let’s say additionally that it’s the mid-19th century, and American expansionism has created a lawless no man’s land in which a Hobbesian war of all against all is being waged — a swirling morass of multiple warring Native American tribes, fanatical Mormons and their ruthless militia, run-of-the-mill settlers, and the United States government, with each side boasting its fair share of rogues, rebels, outlaws, and soldiers for hire. Seems like a pretty good place to get lost in, provided you live long enough to lose yourself.
That’s the setup of American Primeval, Netflix’s new western miniseries. It’s directed by Peter Berg, an auteur of rugged masculinity who also appears in a brief cameo, from a script by creator Mark L. Smith, who previously tackled the genre in Alejandro G. Iňárritu’s masterful survivalist adventure The Revenant. The creative team gives the show a strong pedigree to match its old-school Western premise. If the results are less than transcendent, they’re still entertaining.
Betty Gilpin, who is basically excellent in everything and is thus a welcome presence here, stars as Sara Rowell, aka Sara Holloway. She’s on the run after killing her husband (the clear implication is that abuse was involved), whose old-money family has put a hefty price on her head. With her is Devin (Preston Mota), her son, who has one leg in a brace but chafes at being called a cripple. When the episode begins they are literally at the very end of the line — the point at which the transcontinental railroad is still being built westward. The show might as well have had them stand in front of a sign reading “WARNING: NO CIVILIZATION BEYOND THIS POINT.”
But as Jim Bridger (Shea Whigham), the grizzled but decent boss of a ramshackle fort town bearing his name, puts it to her later, “civilization” and “civilized” are two different things anyway. Outposts of “civilization” like his fort are hellholes where men kill and get killed — including Sara and Devin’s guide — over nothing. Meanwhile the god-fearing members of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, whose goal is to civilize the Utah Territory, savagely massacre anyone who refuses to bend the knee to their prophet and governor, Brigham Young. Indigenous tribes with an ancient history have generated murderous splinter groups or begun doing wetwork for the Mormon raiders. The less said about the entire idea of Western expansion, a campaign of wholesale theft and genocide, the better.
Sara and Devin hope to brave the mess by the side of a group of non-militant Mormon settlers, led by the genially devout Jacob Pratt (Dane DeHaan) and his wife, Abish (Saura Lightfoot Leon). Abish only got that particular gig after her sister, to whom Jacob was supposed to be wed, died unexpectedly. Joining the convoy is a stowaway, an Arapaho girl named Two Moons (Shawnee Pourier); she ran away from home after killing her sexually abusive father, and Devin accepts her into the group without displaying any temptation whatsoever to rat out her presence to the grownups. I like the kid already.
Unfortunately, the camp they travel to is Mormon territory, but the man who runs it, played by director Peter Berg, refuses to pay the required tribute to the LDS government. Led by James Wolsey (Joe Tippett) and his right-hand man Cook (Dominic Bogart), a contingent of the Mormons’ armed and dangerous Nauvoo Legion — masked militia men who do the Church’s dirty work when not serving in a more overt capacity as a security force — sweeps into the camp to punish them for their intransigence. The policy is simple: No witnesses.
In a prolonged, kinetic, brutally violent battle sequence, the Mormons massacre every many woman and child they can get their hands on, but make it look like their hired Paiute allies are solely responsible. (The Paiute get money and women for their trouble.) While Jacob gets partially scalped and left for dead by one of his own co-religionists to further the ruse, Abish and the other Mormon settler women are taken alive and given to the Paiutes to do with what they will. Wolsey knows they won’t survive the ordeal long enough to finger its white ringleaders for the authorities.
But there are still loose ends out there for Wolsey and the Nauvoo Legion to worry about. Besides Jacob, whose survival goes undetected amid the ocean of dead bodies, Sara and Devin make a run for it. They make it out of danger with the help of Isaac Reed (Taylor Kitsch), a tracker who’d previously refused to help guide them but seems to have been following behind them under the assumption that he could profit off their inevitable misfortune. Instead he helps them escape their pursuers to run another day. Meanwhile, a nasty group of Fort Bridger locals led by a tough guy named Virgil (Jai Courtney) kills a bounty hunter on Sara’s trail so they can claim the reward all for themselves — if they can find her first.
Working with cinematographer Jacques Jouffret, Berg brings a distinctive visual sensibility to American Primeval. The daylight is bright and hazy, the angles low and uncomfortable, the color muted and sun-faded, the camera handheld and jitteringly immediate. Action unfolds in chaotic long takes that offer views of the violence that won’t allow you to look away.
As if to complement this visceral approach to these sequences of violence, lead actors Gilpin, Leon, and DeHaan spend much of their time during these conflicts screaming — in panic, fear, pain, confusion, grief. Gilpin in particular sells us on Sara as a fish out of water, one who’s not cut out for the kind of murderous violence she herself had previously committed, by having her react with visible bodily revulsion and abject terror to all the bloodletting she watches unfold. Does she look like a cold-blooded killer to you?
Sara’s storyline also raises a key question about just who she and Devin are, and who they’re looking for. If she killed her husband already, who is the father they’re hoping to reach in far off Crooks Springs, their distant and dangerous destination? Will the guy even want them there if they make it?
American Primeval isn’t going to be reinventing the Western genre anytime soon, if that wasn’t already apparent. Revisionist Westerns — in which there are no black and white hats, no noble cowboys against uniformly savage Indians, just a continent full of broken people trying to live another day — have been around for so long they’re now just, you know, Westerns. This is a project that will rise and fall on the strength of its action, adventure, thriller, suspense, and survival sequences, and on whether the actors can make you care enough about the characters to worry about what happens to them. Westward the wagons, folks, and let’s find out.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
