Netflix series American Primeval gets medieval on 19th-century U.S. history

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

The American West is ripe country for torture porn. The history of how “we won” the region is fraught, to put it lightly. Even that phrase “we won” requires interrogation. First off, who’s “we”? Second, what’s meant by “won”? And what went into the “winning”?

These are the critical questions that have occupied scholars and fired the imaginations of pulp novel readers and later boob-tubers for at least a century. And the genre is sprawling. From Owen Wister’s The Virginian and German author Karl May’s story cycle featuring Winnetou and Old Shatterhand, to The Last of the Mohicans, The Lone Ranger, Gunsmoke, the entire John Wayne cineverse and more, all relied to varying degrees on an interplay of motifs that danced around brutality and morality, barbarism and civilization, heathen dissipation and religious zealotry, individualism and tyranny (though in most depictions, the “good” ultimately “wins”). 

Courtesy photo.

Media depictions of the “Old West” have altered with time, however, and the lens has shifted from the gauzy Frederick Jackson Turner-esque depictions of steely pioneer romance to the grittier realities of settler colonialism. 

However, as cinema scholars point out, the genre as a whole fell in popularity at the end of the 20th century. During the current century — and notably in the past decade or so — Western narratives came roaring back more visceral, pointed and often grimmer than ever before.

Of the highest order is the brilliant portrait of ruthless, murderous ambition in There Will Be Blood (2007) — which somehow managed to encompass every central conflict that defines drama. Then there’s The Revenant, with its unsparing, borderline passion-play depiction of one white guy’s battle with the landscape itself (2015).

Underrated for its sheer brazenness is Bone Tomahawk (also 2015), which is a curious Western horror-satire pitting the requisite mustachioed gunslingers against cave-dwelling Indigenous cannibals. There are big, big problems with all of that, but the reason I’ve always admired the film was for one line of dialogue: “This is why frontier life is so difficult. Not because of the Indians or the elements, but because of the idiots.”

That sentiment rang in my head when I devoured the Amazon limited series The English (2022), and again when I watched — without nearly as much enthusiasm — the Netflix mini-series American Primeval, which was released on the streaming service in early January.

There is much to admire in director Peter Berg’s and writer Mark L. Smith’s six-episode arc, which places viewers in the lawless, liminal and sinister space of the Utah Territory in 1856-’57.

Like the best Westerns, it must treat the environment as a central character, which it does with aplomb, depicting wind-swept high-desert steppe and frigid mountain passes alike. It also achieves something rare in the genre, insofar as it takes the second half of its title seriously — leaning into the “primeval” sense of violent creation-by-destruction inherent in the Western imperial project. 

That said, perhaps a better description would have been “medieval,” as one of the key setpieces in the series is the “fort” lorded over by Jim Bridger (Shea Whigham), which operates essentially as a motte-and-bailey full of backcountry mercenaries, sharpers and landlocked piratical types. In other words, a bunch of idiots whose overweening greed and lack of self awareness get themselves and everyone around them killed.

Oh, and Mormons. That’s where American Primeval has really made its most controversial mark. On the surface, it’s a pretty pat Western story: a woman from Boston with an iron will (Betty Gilpin) is braving the wilds of the West alone with her son who suffers from a bum leg and trying to get to some amorphous place where her absentee husband is supposedly laying his own claim on the “frontier.” She needs a guide, whom she finds in a sulky lumbersexual hunk/hermit with a heart of gold (Taylor Kitsch), and you can imagine where it goes from there.

All that dusty-trail meet-cute, buckskin-petticoat stuff is de rigueur, but American Primeval throws a curveball by centering the radicalism of the early Latter-day Saints, with Gilpin’s character and her son initially seeking safety on their trek — and a way out of Bridger’s den of iniquity — with a group of Mormons on a wagon train that ends up getting bushwacked by a band of fundamentalist LDS paramilitaries.

The real-life Mountain Meadows Massacre was part of the so-called Utah Wars, and took place over about four days in September 1857. The attack on the Baker-Fancher wagon train resulted in more than 120 murders by the Utah Territorial Militia, self-styled as the Nauvoo Legion. The present-day Latter-day Saints don’t like this part of their history, and really don’t like American Primeval’s depiction of what went down, why and the personalities involved — particularly as it relates to one of their founding fathers, Brigham Young, who comes off in the show as a wild-eyed, crazy-like-a-fox, wannabe religio-feudal lord.

According to a statement on the series issued by the church on Jan. 24: “Brigham Young, a revered prophet and courageous pioneer, is, by any historical standard, egregiously mischaracterized as a villainous, violent fanatic. Other individuals and groups are also depicted in ways that reinforce stereotypes that are both inaccurate and harmful.

“As to the Mountain Meadows Massacre, which the series inaccurately portrays as reflective of a whole faith group, the Church has long acknowledged and condemned this horrific tragedy. It has also taken significant steps to uncover and share the full truth of what happened and promote healing.”

What’s more, the LDS statement obliquely addressed a narrative critique echoed by some professional viewers of TV: “The problem with such deceptive, graphic and sensationalized storytelling is that it not only obscures reality and hinders genuine understanding but can foster animosity, hate and even violence. This is particularly troubling today when peacemakers are needed more than ever.”

Is American Primeval too violent and dark-hearted for its own good? I tend to agree with rogerebert.com, which called it “frustrating,” and screenrant.com, which pointed out that the show is so freighted with unrelenting brutality that its characters’ unending ordeals deaden any impulse to empathy or even identification. In short: It’s torture porn on the 19th-century high desert. But isn’t that how the West was “won”? Well, this series is no documentary — and the Mormon Church has some valid points — but, yeah, pretty much.

All episodes streaming now on Netflix.