American Primeval Is Three Westerns in One
If nothing else, American Primeval confirms that Taylor Sheridan doesn’t have a total chokehold on the modern western quite yet. Yes, this is a show about America’s past and how the country’s native people were decimated by white expansion, two subjects Sheridan has tackled in his Yellowstone prequels 1883 and 1923 and in films like Hell or High Water and Wind River. But the only Taylor of note involved here is Taylor Kitsch, and that is a relief.
American Primeval is an uneven yet admirable attempt to drag the televised western back to the likes of Deadwood, Hell on Wheels, and Godless — gritty, grimy, and less interested in romanticizing the past. There are no plucky but courageous settlers who embody the cowboy ideal, and no reassurance that American resourcefulness lives on today on family ranches or oil rigs where men work the land, stand up to the federal government, and tell liberals they suck. This six-episode Netflix miniseries set in the “wild and untamed” Utah Territory of 1857 is instead focused on the fervent Mormons led at the time by Brigham Young (Kim Coates) and suggests their violent attempts to drive non-Mormon settlers and Native tribes out of what they considered their “Zion” established a brutality that seeped into both the land and the American identity.
To make that point, American Primeval links three story lines: the enmity between Young and Jim Bridger (Shea Whigham), a mountain man who built his Fort Bridger as an outpost open to all, which Young wants for himself; the growing affection between tracker and guide Isaac Reed (Kitsch) and former East Coaster Sara Rowell (Betty Gilpin), who hires Isaac to lead her and her son to his father’s gold claim out West; and the Shoshone tribe’s struggle to survive attacks by the Mormons, which heat up when young Mormon woman Abish Pratt (Saura Lightfoot-Leon) witnesses her fellow Latter-day Saints massacre dozens of settlers and takes refuge from her own people with the Shoshone.
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. One of them is gripping and good. One of them is predictable but fine. And one of them feels so similar to The Revenant, which series creator Mark L. Smith also wrote, you’ll wonder if a bear is going to pop out and maul these characters at any moment — which, spoiler alert, basically happens! Here’s how the series traverses the highs and lows of this sprawling, bloody American saga.
The Good
Shea Whigham playing a beleaguered outdoorsman driven by disgust toward Mormons and the wary knowledge that his way of life is probably going to be stamped out in the name of “progress”? Shea Whigham puffing on a giant pipe and delivering dialogue like “Here he comes, all smiles and Jesus, hoping I won’t notice the concurrent twist he’s trying to give my balls”? This is appointment television! Whigham has been reliable as a yesteryear American contemptuous toward America (Gaslit was good, dammit!), and he’s incredibly watchable as Bridger, whose fort serves as the nexus point for the series’ depiction of Young and his Nauvoo Legion, the Mormon army of vigilantes led by frontiersman Wild Bill Hickman (Alex Breaux), and the U.S. Army responding to increased agitation in the American West, led by the exhausted Captain Dellinger (Lucas Neff).
American Primeval presents the Mormons as almost unilaterally responsible for devastation all across Utah; a horribly immersive long take in the premiere whips us around the Mountain Meadows Massacre, with the camera careening from wagon to wagon, ducking under arrow fire, and getting splattered with blood. A fair amount of this is grounded in the historical record, as described by Jon Krakauer in his nonfiction book Under the Banner of Heaven, and American Primeval has absolutely zero sympathy toward any of these characters, whom it depicts as backstabbers, murderers, and scoundrels — and if you somehow miss that, an audacious and gruesome public-whipping sequence late in the miniseries makes its perspective plain. Similarly overobvious is the intermittent narration of Dellinger journaling his dawning realization that the beauty of this country is incompatible with the human beings now claiming they’re destined to own it.
Still, there’s great friction in this story line, because Bridger and Young’s dialogue is simultaneously so florid and pointed, and because the actors playing the Mormon baddies really gnaw on their villainy. This is also the plot that feels most distinct from modern westerns, which sometimes shrink away from considering how religion played into theories of American exceptionalism. American Primeval is making a specific point about how the viciousness of the country’s past never really went away, it just mutated into different forms of governance and religious strictness that endure today. (As Bridger says, “Civilization and civilized are two different words entirely.”) That’s a somber theme that American Primeval also knows how to undercut at times; Dellinger’s repulsed, amusing “These fucking Mormons” is a brief moment of respite from all the blood and gore.
The Familiar
Netflix is primarily marketing American Primeval around Kitsch, which should be understandable to anyone who has seen this man’s face and the agonized emotions it’s capable of conveying. Kitsch’s recluse Isaac Reed is rude and dismissive toward Gilpin’s Sara, but of course he warms up to her and her son Devin (Preston Mota) as he guides them West while evading bounty hunters; in essence, he’s an amalgamation of other characters Kitsch has played for American Primeval series director Peter Berg: Reed has the soft eyes of Tim Riggins from Friday Night Lights, the coherent ethics and razor-sharp survival instincts of Lieutenant Michael Murphy from Lone Survivor, and the pained disconnect from the world of opioid addict Glen Kryger in Painkiller. It’s basically a patented Kitsch role, which means he’s persuasive in it, but also that there’s some predictability to how his characterization plays out.
The same goes for Gilpin, whose Sara has a brassy spark and secret sharpshooting skill; that combination is tailor-made for her skill set as much as Kitsch’s role is. They’re both well cast! They’re just in a story line in which all the major emotional beats are pretty clearly foreshadowed. And there are a couple of details to their portion of American Primeval that feel either underconsidered (like the elinguated young Shoshone woman Two Moons, played by Shawnee Pourier, whose backstory is wispy and sparse) or clichéd (Reed’s tragic past; the recurrent use of sexual abuse against all women in this world). Except for a few deviations that give Gilpin opportunities to be a badass, this is the American Primeval thread with the most formulaic journey and destination: Reed scraps and screams his way through a fight scene, Reed delivers a life lesson to Devin, Reed saves the day, Reed fixes his pain-filled eyes on Sara’s increasingly adoring ones. That isn’t so bad when there’s so much sarcastic flirting between Kitsch and Gilpin, but there isn’t much surprise to it.
The Revenant, Basically
If American Primeval too closely resembles anything, it’s not Sheridan’s reactionary oeuvre or even Friday Night Lights, the previous collaboration between Berg, Kitsch, and Texan post-rock band Explosions in the Sky, which scored both series. It’s 2015’s The Revenant, which Smith and Berg mimic in both the series’ narrative (people left for dead who are out for revenge, a weirdo French contingent, noble natives intent on murdering as many white people as they can) and visuals (extreme 45-degree angles and close-up shots with wide lenses; sprawling compositions of dusty fields, thunderstorm clouds, and snowy mountains). The film spends time explaining conflicts and cultural differences between various tribes and emphasizing that the creation of the United States served as a countdown to the end of their way of life, and you’ll get pretty much all of that from American Primeval, too. Except here, the U.S. military and Mormons are both villainous, the former with their decrees that Native tribes move into government-mandated reservations and the latter with their tendency to pretend to be Natives when murdering settlers.
From a historical perspective, it’s admirable that American Primeval addresses the divisions both between tribes like the Paiute, who are aligned with the Mormons, and the Shoshone, who oppose them, and within the same tribe, like the renegade Shoshone group called the Wolf Clan, whose members commit guerrilla warfare against the Latter-day Saints. There’s a degree of care here thanks to the Indigenous cultural consultants, language experts, and casting directors who worked on the show, and all of this — the design of the Shoshone’s community, the rituals of the male and female warriors, the arguments between leaders about how to address outside threats — helps this aspect of American Primeval feel well considered.
If this story line just included Native characters, it would feel even more distinct from the rest of the series and underscore the contrast between how the country’s Indigenous tribes and the invading settlers approach and view the land. But American Primeval links the Shoshone to the other two primary story lines via the Pratts, a married Mormon pair whose centrality evokes The Revenant and so many other white-centered westerns that have come before. Dane DeHaan gives good crazy eyes as Jacob Pratt, who is nearly scalped by fellow members of his faith during the Mountain Meadows Massacre and then unknowingly joins his attackers to find his missing wife Abish, who has been taken in by Wolf Clan leader Red Feather (Derek Hinkey). Massively TBI-ed Jacob so wants to be reunited with Abish that he doesn’t realize his new brothers, including Nauvoo Legion leader James Wolsey (Joe Tippett), are intent on killing her to silence her knowledge of the massacre, while Abish’s bond with the Shoshone grows into a more genuine connection than she ever had with her fellow Mormons.
Abish’s dynamic with Red Feather zigs where we might expect it to zag, and Hinkey has intense gravitas as the brooding fighter. But American Primeval doesn’t quite extend the care it gives Native communities to their individual characters; we view the Shoshone and what they’re going through primarily through the eyes of Jacob and Amish, who are themselves underwritten. This story line is simultaneously the series’ most well intentioned and most hesitant, not as fiery or finely written as Bridger and Young’s rivalry or as slow-burning as Reed and Sara’s relationship. American Primeval begins with a text card that explains nearly everyone in the Utah Territory was “caught in the bloody crossfire” between the military, the Mormons, the settlers, and the Indigenous peoples, but it really would have been helped by concluding text explaining what happened to the Shoshone, the Paiute, the Ute, and the series’ other depicted tribes after 1857, and to hammer home the contradictory nature of this era of American “progress.” American Primeval’s attention to that aspect of our past goes far, but not quite far enough.
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