American Primeval

Kitsch and Gilpin have phenomenal chemistry, and watching how they navigate around their characters’ strengths and flaws, and ultimately make each other whole, is truly a masterclass in performance, direction, and writing.

The wild west never looked so wild, nor as nasty, broken and desolate. Halfway though, I’m engrossed, but also genuinely shocked. Don’t watch it if you can’t take violence. Just don’t.

Tough in every sense, American Primeval is nonetheless worth your time thanks to exceptionally well-choreographed bouts of violence that take an unflinching look at modern America's cruel, savage origins. 

The six episodes present a brutal, fascinating depiction of a culture and a country that has yet to overcome its most violent predilections.

American Primeval could have had better legs as an anthology with loose connective threads. But if you hitch yourself on this bandwagon, this is a wild ride that captures a historical turning point in a relentlessly unflinching watch.

The violence is unrelenting, thanks to director Peter Berg. Yet the series feels pacy and the brutality of what we’re seeing doesn’t make for an unbearably bleak viewing experience, because it is tempered by placing two female characters at the heart of the drama.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"Primeval" achieves its shocking goal and then some, but it doesn't quite have a story that's engrossing enough past its desire to make you clutch your pearls.

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.

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.

This is, to be clear, high-quality misery and an educational antidote to sentimental myth. Whether you want to put yourself through it is a matter for you.

For all its power to compel – and it is a gripping yarn – there isn’t quite the heft such a carefully attended drama should have, or even appears to think it has. The message seems to be the same as all modern westerns: pioneer life was nasty, brutish and short.

You’ve seen this tale many times before, albeit rarely with this much excessive embellishment—not to mention distaste for the Church of Latter-Day Saints.

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.

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.

It’s hard to build up too much admiration for the performances within an unrelenting dirge. For genre purists, “American Primeval” will satiate your need for a handsomely mounted western, but for everyone else, it’s unlikely to be worth the journey.

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.

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.

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.

Blessed with the vast emotional palette of human existence, Smith and Berg fill their canvas primarily with “brutality,” working with a bloody, intense precision that makes American Primeval effective for a while, but ultimately monotonous.

“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.

Berg wants people to think this his gory, raw approach is true to history, when in fact it’s a manipulative tale of survival, as tasteless as it is hollow.

Berg’s technical flair can’t elevate the material, which is so thin it leaves even a cast this talented more than a bit adrift.