In Netflix’s Gritty and Ambitious American Primeval, a Wild West Melting Pot Boils Over

Whenever westerns surge in popularity, as they have on TV since Yellowstone became a surprise megahit in 2018, you can be certain our collective understanding of American identity is in flux. After decades of morally simplistic cowboys-and-Indians movies that reinforced the intrepid self-image of a rising world power, revisionist westerns proliferated during the Vietnam War, critiquing the violence of white imperialism. Recent reinventions of the genre have focused on such contemporary concerns as corporate overreach and the complex set of internecine conflicts that inevitably arise within—and threaten to destroy—pluralistic societies.

American Primeval, Netflix’s most ambitious western series to date, is unusually explicit in its aim of exploring the latter theme, with results that range from astutely observant to ham-fisted and jarringly sentimental. The setting is the Utah Territory in 1857, where, as North and South hurtle towards war, different factions battle for control of the frontier. There are mountain men, bounty hunters, so-called pioneers. Brigham Young (Kim Coates) leads a militia of Mormons whose quest for religious freedom has turned frighteningly cutthroat; a U.S. Army charged with preventing him from gaining too much power surveils his every move. The people with the oldest, best claim on this land are Indigenous communities including the Ute, Paiute, and Shoshone, each of which has its own strategies for surviving the influx of colonizers. 

Into this crucible ride Sara (Betty Gilpin) and her preteen son, Devin (Preston Mota), en route from the Northeast and in need of a guide for the treacherous final leg of their journey to reunite with Sara’s husband. When they meet Isaac (Taylor Kitsch), the near-feral man who will eventually lead them, at Fort Bridger in Wyoming, he scandalizes Sara with his casual nudity. But she has secrets that heighten her desperation for his help. Completing their found family is Two Moons (Shawnee Pourier), a young Native American woman fleeing a horrific home. What she and Sara share is that archetypal quality of western heroes: resilience. Fort Bridger, ruled by its gruff but goodhearted namesake Jim Bridger (Shea Whigham), doubles as the launchpad for a series of grim, bloody encounters between Young’s militia, a pair of Mormon newlyweds (Dane DeHaan and Saura Lightfoot-Leon), Shoshone warrior Red Feather (Derek Hinkey), and an increasingly jaded Army captain (Lucas Neff).

Tokala Black Elk, left, and Derek Hinkey in American PrimevalNetflix

There’s no question that the increasingly histrionic Yellowstone is the most influential western of the moment, spawning not just prequels like 1883 and 1923, but also creating a market for other tales of rugged patriarchs battling powerful outsiders to save their drama-prone families' ranches, from Netflix’s Territory (Australian Yellowstone) to Amazon’s Outer Range (sci-fi Yellowstone). Primeval has a different sensibility. More stark than soapy, in line with creator Mark L. Smith’s screenplay for The Revenant, it has the desaturated look of a sepia-tone photo and requires a strong stomach for gore. At its most trenchant, the show touches on similar themes to the great 2022 Amazon-BBC miniseries The English, which contrasted the psychopathic belligerence of various Wild West cohorts with an idealistic but never naive vision of cross-cultural connection.

Smith and director Peter Berg’s misstep is to foreground the trite story of Sara and Isaac—yet another righteous woman melting the heart of a cold, wounded man. Though they kill when they have to, their party functions as an oasis of relative decency amid the war of all against all that rages around them. 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, a perennially underrated actor who broke out in Berg’s Friday Night Lights. As their romance inches towards its predictable conclusion, 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.