‘American Primeval’ Is a Bloody Slog Through the Old West

“There is only brutality here.” 

This is a line from a letter that a U.S. Army captain, played by Lucas Neff, writes to his loved ones back home, midway through the new Netflix miniseries American Primeval. It’s an unfortunately apt statement, albeit not a surprising one if you know that the show was created by The Revenant screenwriter Mark L. Smith. Smith has written a wallow that repeatedly mistakes suffering for profundity, and seems to take more pleasure out of finding nasty ways to kill characters than it does in making those characters interesting enough for viewers to care about when they die. 

The show mixes historical figures with fictional ones, placing them together in the Utah Territory circa 1857. We begin with Sara (Betty Gilpin) and her son Devin (Preston Mota) heading west to reconnect with Sara’s husband, though it’s unclear whether he is expecting, or even desiring, their arrival. Jim Bridger (Shea Whigham), a fur trapper who has set up a thriving economic hub out of a fort he named for himself, warns Sara that such a journey is foolhardy at best, and most likely will kill her and Devin. When enigmatic mountain man Isaac (Taylor Kitsch) declines to serve as their guide, Sara latches on with a larger group traveling in the same direction, which includes Jacob (Dane DeHaan) and Abish (​​Saura Lightfoot Leon), a young Mormon couple eager to link up with Brigham Young (Kim Coates) and his flock. Things get graphically violent in a hurry, and soon the narrative is split between Isaac trying to lead Sarah, Devin, and a mute girl named Two Moons (Shawnee Pourier) to safety, and escalating tensions between the Army, Young’s militia, and members of the Shoshone tribe. 

Whigham’s wry performance, and the recurrence of Bridger offering sensible advice to people who ignore it, always at their peril, isn’t exactly funny. But it’s the closest American Primeval comes to offering some relief from the misery. Everything else is, well, brutality for its own sake, including multiple sexual assaults, a character being scalped in close-up, and other pieces of graphic violence. The violence happens to be orchestrated by director Peter Berg — collaborating with Kitsch for the fifth time, dating back to the Friday Night Lights TV show — who has a knack for finding interesting and unconventional ways to depict action, like the way a volley of arrows looks and sounds like an apocalyptic event. 

But 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. It’s only been a few months since Starz’s Three Women demonstrated how effective Gilpin can be even in a project with iffy writing. Here, she’s mostly just required to suffer stoically, which she can do, but it seems an utter waste of her. DeHaan is, as has unfortunately been the case too often in his career, given a bunch of strange tics and asked to generate a character out of that. But at no point is Jacob and Abish’s relationship — nor either of them as individuals — established strongly enough for his quest to find her to have any impact at all. Kitsch is also playing notes he’s been given before, in better projects, as he whispers and broods about the tragedies in Isaac’s past. 

Though the two main stories start out intertwined, they very quickly have nothing to do with one another. It’s unclear why they’re even in the same project at all, other than to provide different ways to illustrate Smith’s larger, overly familiar point about what a cruel, nasty, and merciless environment the West could be. There is also, it turns out, tedium here. 

All six episodes of American Primeval are now streaming on Netflix. I’ve seen the whole thing.