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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
13
Mixed:
12
Negative:
4
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Critic Reviews
Screen RantAug 28, 2025
Season 1 Review:
While the characters are rather surface-level, the show's dark storyline coupled with an unflinching look at the mid-19th century West, makes for a show that puts mood above all. While it wasn't always my cup of tea, those who like the tone of The Revenant will be pleased with American Primeval, even if it falls a little short.
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Jan 9, 2025
Season 1 Review:
These plots are each varyingly compelling, and the cast does a believable job communicating this country’s grim history. But American Primeval’s story lines are so separated in terms of stakes, physical locations, and pacing that the whole thing often feels disjointed — like this single miniseries is actually three different shows.
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The GuardianJan 8, 2025
Jan 8, 2025
Season 1 Review:
The violence in American Primeval is so constant that it becomes numbing and almost predictable, making any of these storylines—and the fates of many of these characters, as we honestly don’t get to know many of them outside the direst of circumstances—feel like an afterthought to the main event, triple underlining the brutality of a bloody chapter in American history.
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Jan 8, 2025
Season 1 Review:
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.
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IndieWireJan 9, 2025
Sep 4, 2025
Season 1 Review:
Berg and Smith’s on-screen vision is all pain with very little relief, making a binge-watch of this series a bit of a masochistic exercise. Knowing that the show employed an enormous amount of help to ensure what it captured was as real as possible, including indigenous cultural consultants and Mormon and military experts, is impressive but almost makes things worse.
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Jan 10, 2025
Season 1 Review:
A relentless and (some of Jim Bridger’s lines aside) absolutely humorless television series, sees violence as a floating plague, a random affliction that visits each group in turn, an inevitable thing that cannot be controlled, rather than something with an infinitely variable relationship to human agency.
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Jan 9, 2025
Season 1 Review:
By the end of the six-episode season, this narrative has lapsed into mawkishness, despite strong performances from Gilpin (who’s made a career on blending grit with vulnerability) and Kitsch. .... The more intriguing characters who populate Primeval’s periphery—where a web of allegiances, compromises, and betrayals echoes our current state of sociopolitical chaos—fade into a fog of gunpowder.
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