Stream It Or Skip It?

Shows and films have depicted the push to settle the American West in more realistic ways as the years have gone on; the hardships are made to look harder, the combatants are more desperate, and the idea that the land that became part of the United States was taken from its original occupants with a lot of bloodshed became more acceptable to portray. In a new Netflix series, we get a look at the lawless Utah Territory in the 1850s, when battles between settlers, Mormons, Native Americans and the US Military came to a head.

Opening Shot: “UTAH TERRITORY, 1857. Wild and Untamed. The United States Army, Mormon Militia, Native Americans and Pioneers, all locked in a brutal war for survival. Caught in the bloody crossfire are every man, woman and child who dare to enter this… American Primeval.”

The Gist: Sarah Rowell (Betty Gilpin) and her son Devin (Preston Mota) are at a train station outside St. Louis, looking for transport to Utah Territory, where she is supposed to meet her husband. First, though, she has to get to Fort Bridger, in southwest Wyoming, to meet up with a guide to take her the rest of the way.

When the guide she hired for the first leg gets her to Fort Bridger, she’s distressed to learn from the fort’s founder, Jim Bridger (Shea Whigham), that the guide left when Sarah’s arrival was delayed by weeks. As she tries to get her current guide to go on with her to Utah, the local drunk shoots the guide dead, and Bridger creams the drunk with a shovel. Sarah tries to shield her son from all the killing, but it’s all around them in the lawless fort.

Despite the odds of getting to Utah being long, especiallya as winter approaches, Sarah insists that she needs to go now, and is willing to offer generous pay to whoever can get her there. Bridger explains to Sarah that it’s not just the Natives or the wildlife that they have to watch out for, but Mormons who are defending the terrirory in the name of Brigham Young (Kim Coates), and the US soldiers that are there to fight both the Mormons and Natives.

Out of desperation, she agrees to go with Bridger to the woods outside the fort to talk to a guide and recluse named Isaac Reed (Taylor Kitsch). “I ain’t got no business in Crooks,” he says, referring to the town where she needs to go. “Especially with a woman and a cripple,” referring to Devin’s leg brace.

She finally manages to get in a caravan with a Morman named Jacob Pratt (Dane DeHaan), who is looking to settle on a plot of land with his pregnant wife Abish (Saura Lightfoot-Leon). As they make their way to the southwest, a bounty hunter approaches Bridger. He has a wanted poster with Sarah’s picture on it, under a different last name. She’s wanted for murder back in Boston, and the reward is a handsome $1,500.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? American Primeval is reminiscent of the 2022 miniseries The English.

Our Take: A lot more happens in the first episode than what we described above, especially an epic raid of the camp Sarah and Devin are in, led by Natives paid off by either Mormon militia, the bounty hunters or both. It’s a devastating raid, and Sarah and Devin only manage to come out of it alive because Isaac comes to their aid.

That raid takes up much of the episode’s last 15 minutes, and it really illustrates what creator Mark L. Smith is trying to show in American Primeval. Peter Berg, who directed the series and is an executive producer (he also plays the head of the wagon train, putting Mormons on the perimeter of camp as sacrificial lambs), shows just how chaotic things are in the Utah Territory in those pre-Civil War years, with arrows and bullets flying everywhere, and giving us a close-up look at an ox barrelling into a wagon Sarah and her son are hiding under.

It’s certainly a bleak picture that Smith and Berg paint, and it’s not like the first 45 minutes were filled with sun and flowers. It’s a miracle that anyone survived being out in that wilderness, between the battles over territory, the weather and the wildlife. It truly was lawless out there, with no deterrent to anyone who needed to kill to get where and what they wanted.

What we wonder is if this bleakness will permeate the entire series, as opposed to the first couple of episodes. It really all depends on Gilpin and Kitsch, two actors that we have loved to watch in previous projects. Is Sarah really meeting her husband or running from the law? And what is Isaac’s motivation to protect them? Is it the reward? Something else?

There are other people in the mix, like Jacob, who looked like he was dead but ends up being one of the few survivors; he’s trying to find his wife and make sure she and the baby survive. Then there’s Virgil Cutter (Jai Courtney), who offers his services to the bounty hunter who is after Sarah but ends up killing him so he and his family can take the entire reward.

This could be a pulse-pounding, exciting look at how violent and chaotic that region in that time period was. We certainly want to see Gilpin and Kitsch play off each other as Isaac tries to get Sarah and her son to Utah. But there’s a feeling in the back of our minds that we’re going to see a massive body count before we get to anything that resembles a positive event.

Sex and Skin: None in the first episode, except for a look at Kitsch’s backside as Isaac openly gets dressed in front of a horrified Sarah, who is shielding her son Devin’s eyes.

Parting Shot: Jacob, who looks like he’s dead like the others who were attacked, starts to move; he gets up, his head bloody from being scalped. He calls for Abish, who is missing.

Sleeper Star: Shawnee Pourier plays Two Moons, a Native girl who stabs a man who routinely raped her and stows away with Sarah and Devin. We don’t know what her fate was during the raid, but we expect to see more of her.

Most Pilot-y Line: None we could find.

Our Call: STREAM IT. American Primeval is an unsparing look at a segment of the American West in the 1850s that pretty much saw conflict, blood and death every single day. It’s certainly bleak, but it also reflects what it was really like for people heading West at that time, and why survival was probably their greatest achievement.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.