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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
13
Mixed:
12
Negative:
4
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Critic Reviews
Jan 9, 2025
Season 1 Review:
One of the lures of a creation story such as “American Primeval” is the promise of pretty myths being burned down like a tribal village. And a reminder of how fragile civilization is, especially when self-preservation is at the top of everyone’s frontier agenda. These promises are fulfilled; the production becomes impossible not to watch. .... The performances are generally terrific.
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The TelegraphJan 9, 2025
The Mercury NewsJan 22, 2025
Season 1 Review:
Berg throws dirty, cold water onto any romantic notion about the Wild West and that might put some off. If you’re one of them, stick with “Yellowstone” instead. But if you were a fan of “The Revenant” (Smith wrote it), this addictive series needs to make it way into your queue.
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Jan 8, 2025
Season 1 Review:
Lives up to its name on every level. This is one of the grittiest, grimiest, bloodiest and most chaotic Westerns in recent memory — a bone-rattling and visceral experience that escalates the tension level from episode to episode and plunges us deep into the mud and muck of the 1850s, and the fierce clashes of culture and religion that result in terrible slaughter at every turn.
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Jan 9, 2025
Season 1 Review:
American Primeval is an unsparing look at a segment of the American West in the 1850s that pretty much saw conflict, blood and death every single day. It’s certainly bleak, but it also reflects what it was really like for people heading West at that time, and why survival was probably their greatest achievement.
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Jan 9, 2025
Season 1 Review:
It’s good — beautifully produced, with evident dedication to cultural detail, full of interesting if not always palatable characters acted with commitment. .... The question is, are you interested in living in this mostly unpleasant space for something like six hours? One might even say that the series succeeds by being difficult to watch. (I don’t recommend bingeing it in any case; it’s exhausting.) There is an emotional payoff at the end, if you’re not too numb to appreciate it, but it takes some hard traveling to get there.
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Jan 8, 2025
Season 1 Review:
An all-star ensemble and compelling historical setting aren’t ultimately enough to pin down such a sprawling epic, especially when it’s being told with such distracting camerawork. Given either more economic storytelling or more time – and less frenetic frames – Netflix could’ve really struck gold.
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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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Jan 9, 2025
Season 1 Review:
“American Primeval” is mostly dead on the page. There’s not enough excitement in the ideas, and there’s not enough thought in the storytelling. What’s left is the sometimes orgiastic brutality — no different from the violence in the kind of low-rent entertainment “American Primeval” wants to separate itself from — and the manifold formulas of the western.
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The PlaylistJan 9, 2025
Season 1 Review:
As disposable entertainment, it’s mediocre; as history, it’s poorly researched white savior propaganda cosplaying as representation. Ugly inside and out and only passably engaging due to the valiant efforts of the cast, “American Primeval” misses its mark and then some and would serve the world best by slumping off on a ride towards the sunset, never to return.
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