American Primeval

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.