American Primeval Review: Netflix’s Gritty Tale of the American West Is a Gory, Violent Slog

Call it the Yellowstone effect, but our current pop culture moment is positively obsessed with the idea of the American West. With multiple Yellowstone spinoffs in the works and series like Landman and Lawman: Bass Reeves streaming on Paramount+, it was only a matter of time before other networks and streamers jumped on the trend.

On the surface, Netflix’s American Primeval has a lot to recommend it. It has a dark prestige feel, a buzzy cast that includes fan favorites like Taylor Kitsch and Betty Gilpin, and it’s one of the few period dramas focused on American history rather than Regency-era romance. But don’t be taken in —  underneath its impressive production values and abundant violence, this show is fool’s gold.

A sprawling saga that’s overstuffed in terms of both storylines and characters, American Primeval is almost painfully honest about the violent origins of American identity and the gritty truths of everyday life on the frontier.

But its confusing, overly bleak narrative forgets to give its characters anything resembling satisfying arcs or its audience a reason to care about anyone they’re watching.

Instead, director Peter Berg offers an almost endless stream of violence and bloodshed — there are shootings, stabbings, scalpings, lashings, throat cuttings, beatings, child murder, and strangulation, not to mention rape and sexual menace. Blood flies, shattered bone shines through torn limbs, and bits of brain matter poke out of an injured man’s skull. 

It’s all very realistically presented, thanks to the show’s obviously ample Netflix budget, but outside of the scale of the carnage presented onscreen, American Primeval has nothing particularly new or interesting to say about the violence it depicts. 

It’s not just that the show’s covering well-trod ground, thematically speaking, it’s that it does so incredibly clumsily, using the most predictable arcs and archetypal characters to tell a story that essentially boils down to the idea that the American West — and perhaps America itself — was a deeply lawless place. Maybe not that much has changed after all. 

The story follows a woman named Sara Rowell (Gilpin) and her son Devin (Preston Mota), who are ostensibly heading west to meet up with the boy’s estranged father in Crooks Springs.

Sara’s reasons for this are more complicated than they initially appear, but few are eager to take on the responsibility of guiding a woman and a child through the wilderness. 

It doesn’t help that the pair arrive in the Utah Territory at a moment in history that’s marked by roiling religious tension and cultural conflict, as competing groups scrabble for both the ownership of the land and control of its future. 

The unspoken threat of violence and/or sexual menace colors virtually any interaction, and one of the first things Sara sees upon her arrival in Ft. Bridger is a man shot to death in front of her.

Subtle, American Primeval is not. 

What follows is a steady stream of violence and nonsensical plot twists, as Sara and her son join up with a wagon train heading west, and find themselves embroiled in a string of life-threatening events and political machinations. 

Vaguely inspired by the real-life events of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, the group of settlers is set upon by an armed, marked Mormon militia, who seems to be following LDS leader Brigham Young’s (Kim Coates) increasingly intense teachings about fighting back against persecution of their faith and those who do not share it. 

In one of several sequences of wide-scale carnage, the majority of the wagon train is murdered. Bodies are scattered everywhere. Riders hunt down the settlers who attempt to flee. Chaos and destruction reign.

A group of women are lined up as what are essentially prizes for the native warriors the militiamen brought in to help fight. Most of them end up with their throats slit after begging for their lives.

The unmasked Mormon soldiers openly plot to blame the natives (or “hostiles” as many in the army and at the fort refer to them) for all the deaths, scalping the dead and the living at random. 

After miraculously dodging hails of arrows, charging riders, and even an out-of-control bull, Sara and her son are ultimately rescued by Isaac Reed (Taylor Kitsch), the same mysterious frontiersman who’d refused to help them when he was initially asked to do so by fort leader Jim Bridger (Shea Whigham).

Why he changed his mind about helping her, when he decided to follow Sara and the wagon train, or why he chose to hide from the larger group are not questions the show is interested in answering, and it’s unclear if it’s because of sheer narrative laziness or simply because stoicism is Reed’s entire personality. 

(It’s one of many unanswered questions you’ll have over the course of this show.)

Perhaps if American Primeval had just focused on Sara’s story—the past she’s so determined to run away from, the nebulous future she’s running toward, and her complicated and often combative relationship with Reed—the show might have faired better.  

Instead, it clumsily introduces about a half dozen other major characters, most of whom exist to die violently at various points in the story, and the show struggles to find anything worthwhile to say about their lives or the cultural landscape that kills them. 

There’s a well-meaning Mormon settler Jacob Pratt (Dane DeHaan) who miraculously manages to survive both a violent scalping only to find himself driven mad by the unforgiving world he’s found himself in.

There’s his missing wife, Abish (Saura Lightfoot Leon), taken hostage by Shoshone warrior Red Feather (Derek Hinkey), only to find that her experience among her captors is not what she expected.

And there’s young native woman Two Moons (Shawnee Pourier), forced to flee her tribe after killing her would-be rapist, who finds a new family — or at least becomes a dedicated babysitter — with the Rowells.

The questions you have about each of these characters will rapidly outstrip the few facts you know about them and most are thinly sketched archetypes whose stories you’ve seen told better on other shows, from Reed’s predictably tragic backstory and Abish’s fierce refusal to be tamed to the mustache-twirling villainy of Utah governor and Mormon prophet Young (Kim Coates).

If there’s one figure worth caring about it is Sara, whose story is the most interesting of the bunch, particularly when she’s allowed to embrace the darkness within herself that society says she’s not supposed to have. 

The fact that the show never bothers to dig into much of her backstory — beyond mentioning the violence she has committed and the consequences she’s running from — is unfortunate, as is the fact that writing that frequently requires her to be the dumbest possible version of herself to advance the story. 

But Gilpin does her best with an often thankless role, infusing Sara with a deep-seated ferocity and determination that’s rarely granted to a woman of this period.

While Kitsch will undoubtedly be a draw for many viewers (Texas forever!), he’s given relatively little to do besides brood stoically, grunt expressively, and fight people. The last-minute romance that springs up between Sara and Reed is somehow both inevitable and strangely tacked on, often feeling as though it happens out of proximity or convenience more than anything else.

American Primeval concludes with (what else?) a final cacophony of violence and as the final credits roll, you may wonder what the point of it all was. And the truth is, not much.

The show is full of beautiful vistas and sweeping landscapes, and even the omnipresent violence is shot with tremendous care and detail. But it never bothers to turn that detail inward and, as a result, is almost completely hollow. 

American Primeval premieres Thursday, January 9 on Netflix.

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