‘American Primeval’ Review: Betty Gilpin Leads Netflix’s Relentlessly Brutal Peter Berg-Helmed Western Miniseries

In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes famously described the life of man in an uncivilized state as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

In Netflix‘s American Primeval, a new six-episode miniseries about life on the Western edge of civilization circa 1857, an Army captain played by Lucas Neff simplifies matters. He writes, in a generally pompous missive that doubles as voiceover, “There is only brutality here.”

This nihilistic observation about the nature of man and Ye Olde West could also apply to American Primeval itself, which hails from previous chronicler of Western brutality Mark L. Smith (The Revenant) and director Peter Berg. 

Blessed with the vast emotional palette of human existence, Smith and Berg fill their canvas primarily with “brutality,” working with a bloody, intense precision that makes American Primeval effective for a while, but ultimately monotonous. Boasting a strong ensemble of actors buried under period-appropriate layers of troweled-on grime and scruffiness, the show has an undeniable visceral impact and should find a Taylor Sheridan-primed audience willing to buy in. But it fails to find any fresh insights to give it a place in the Deadwood/Godless/Unforgiven pantheon of the well-trod genre.

The story is set in the Utah Territory, where horrible conflict is simmering between Zion-seeking Mormons, Manifest Destiny-driven pioneers, Native American tribes getting pushed further and further into the corner of the land that was once theirs, and the U.S. Army entrusted with keeping the peace. Some of the settlers are driven by fear, some by zealotry and others by the promises of limitless wealth, but in this moment, life is unquestionably solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

Sara Rowell (Betty Gilpin) and her son Devin (Preston Mota) arrive at Fort Bridger, a generally neutral stopping place overseen by Jim Bridger (Shea Whigham). She’s going to meet her husband somewhere deeper in-country, but she misses her convoy. Warning her that “civilization and civilized are two different words entirely,” Bridger gets Sara situated with a small party of Mormons led by Jacob Pratt (Dane DeHaan) and his new wife Abish (Saura Lightfoot Leon), who are heading in the right direction. Don’t google “Mountain Meadows Massacre” if you don’t want to know what’s coming. Short version? Brutality, complicated by a Mormon militia and some renegade Shoshone warriors.

Soon, Sara and Devin are witnesses to something that the Mormons — including Brigham Young (Kim Coates, oozing rectitude) — don’t want them to witness. Before long, the Mormons are pursuing the Rowells, who are also being pursued by several bounty hunters, including a party led by Jai Courtney’s Virgil. Sara and Devin might not be seeking a new life so much as fleeing the old one.

The only people who can help Sara and Devin are Isaac (Taylor Kitsch), a grouchy mountain man, and Two Moons (Shawnee Pourier), a mute Shoshone girl fleeing her own violent past. 

I will always be an appreciator, at least on a basic level, of the muscularity of Berg’s direction. His clear-eyed bluntness helped make Netflix’s Painkiller a more successful anti-Sackler screed than the more acclaimed Dopesick. Here, he brings a charge to the familiar Western iconography that helps American Primeval stand out from most of the rushed Sheridan/Yellowstone factory output. Berg’s depiction of the Mountain Meadows Massacre is disorienting, nightmarish and terrifyingly immersive, a bravura symphony of whizzing arrows and curdling screams. There isn’t anything especially fresh about the tableaus of solitary riders making their way across the prairies or the shots of snowy mountain passes, but Berg has studied his John Ford and Robert Altman, and he executes the genre clichés with panache. His efforts are boosted by a grimy and grinding score from frequent collaborator Explosions in the Sky.

The visual flair peaks in the first episode, along with the series’ shallow, if not necessarily inapt, insight into life in this particular time and place. I have no doubt that 1857 Utah was pervasively miserable, and Berg captures a miasma of gangrenous wounds, rarely rotated attire, lice-infested beards and freshly butchered meat. It’s easy to find things to be disgusted or unsettled by, but harder to find sources of empathy — which never used to be the case on earlier Berg projects like Friday Night Lights. Too often, the scripts here lean into the ongoing threat of scalping or sexual violence — integral to the narrative of nearly every female character in the series — as a way to make viewers not so much care about any individuals as root for additional retaliatory violence.

American Primeval is likely to earn the ire of Mormons and Native American advocacy groups alike (the U.S. military is presented as pompous and ineffective, but somewhat hygienic). Abish is the most sympathetic of the Mormon characters, and the least ideologically Mormon; while one or two of the Shoshone characters have admirable attributes, the choice we’re given is essentially between slow-speaking “wise” figures and warriors likely to have “ululating” as their only close-captioned dialogue. The ensemble is a mishmash of fictional and historical figures, all rendered similarly glum and all destined for similarly cynical — Hobbes should have added “ironic” to his list of adjectives — fates. 

If Hobbes’ quote is generally presented as advocating for governance or control, American Primeval almost seems willing to accept the nastiness in exchange for the scruffy solidarity. It lands on the side of the outsiders — Whigham’s Bridger delivers some straight-talking glimpses of humor, Kitsch’s Isaac some Eastwood-ian monosyllabic heroism and Gilpin’s Sara some proto-feminist backbone. Those were probably my favorite performances, though Leon — who gives a Missing Mara Sister vibe — has welcome punchy attitude and a story arc that makes no sense. Meanwhile, I watched the first half of the first episode and thought, “What an unusually relaxed and normal part for Dane DeHaan.” Needless to say that didn’t last.

Like DeHaan’s performance, everything in American Primeval gravitates toward the wretched and, yes, the brutal. The finale is either a powerful confirmation of what came before if you previously bought into it or a ridiculous and wildly predictable repetition of everything that came before. I’m going with the latter. If you spend five episodes talking about the nihilistic brutality of Ye Olde West and reach a finale in which you reveal the nihilistic brutality of Ye Olde West — accompanied by on-the-nose compositional sampling of “This Land Is Your Land” — you haven’t really taken your audience on much of a journey, have you?