‘American Primeval’ Doesn’t Flinch From the Frontier’s Brutality

By Keith Roysdon

Editor’s Note: A version of this story first appeared in The Good, the Bad, and the Elegy, a newsletter from the Daily Yonder focused on the best, and worst, in rural media, entertainment, and culture. Every other Thursday, it features reviews, retrospectives, recommendations, and more. You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article to receive future editions in your inbox.

I dare you to watch “American Primeval” on Netflix and not feel cold. It’s not just the stark and snowy landscapes of 1857 Utah that’ll have you shivering. It’s also the brutal feel of the filmmaking, which does not sugarcoat the dangers of traveling across Western American territories in the years before the Civil War.

It’s hard to imagine how any film or TV series – the six episodes of “American Primeval” began streaming on January 9 – could bring something new to the campfire given the 100-plus years of Westerns on screen. We’ve seen a lot of depictions of the “wild west,” from silent films to John Wayne to Kevin Costner’s “Horizon,” just last year.

The Western movie ruled Hollywood for years until it fell out of fashion, but filmmakers like Costner loved the genre, not only continuing to make films featuring men, women, horses, and vast, open spaces but also injecting a note of Western flavor into other genres: We’re not certain that’s why Costner, Sean Connery, and their cohorts rode horseback to intercept liquor smugglers in the 1987 classic “The Untouchables,” but it’s a cool scene in a cool movie and I wasn’t about to complain.

If “American Primeval” brings nothing new other than gory brutality set among the scenic locations, then that alone might be its selling point. I’m curious how many viewers have heard about “American Primeval” without hearing about its bloody scenes of violence, including a first-episode scalping?

True Grit

Watching “American Primeval,” I found myself thinking of “Deadwood,” David Milch’s outstanding series that debuted in 2004 and, through three seasons and a movie, followed the dark and gritty stories of Deadwood, South Dakota in the 1870s.

(“Deadwood” fans will understand when I say that the comparison between the two series goes beyond the bloody presence of hogs.)

“Deadwood” was, for all its excellence, a conventional episodic TV series with an ensemble cast that told compelling, bawdy, and bloody tales of life in a frontier town. Costner’s “Horizon” series of movies – assuming we ever see them all, since the first installment failed at the box office – was akin to the preamble to “Deadwood,” with characters moving across the West toward a new city that’s teased, through handbills and word of mouth, as a fresh opportunity for those without roots.

“American Primeval” brings elements of both storylines, with the murderous battle to settle Mormon-ruled Utah intertwined with stories of people just passing through, trying to get somewhere else and getting caught up in the conflict between Mormons, the United States Army, local settlers, and the Shoshone people.

As in “Deadwood,” there’s a sprinkling of real-life figures, including mountaineer Jim Bridger (Shea Whigham), who’s established a fort desired by both the Mormons and the U.S. military. There’s also the leader of the Mormon’s Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Brigham Young (Kim Coates), who is by this point in history the governor of Utah. Historians have said that, unsurprisingly, the series plays fast and loose with the truth, distilling these larger-than-life personalities into fodder for modern-day drama.

The main characters are fictional – archetypes of the real-life people once embroiled in, or at least trying to survive, these conflicts of the day.

Betty Gilpin plays Sara Holloway, traveling to a small Utah town, ostensibly to be with her husband. Her son, Devin (Preston Mota), travels with her. Sara has a secret that puts her in the crosshairs of bounty hunters, and she turns to Isaac Reed (Taylor Kitsch), a mountain man mourning the loss of his family, who reluctantly agrees to escort Sara, Devin, and Two Moons, a young indigenous woman played by Shawnee Pourier, across country.

Their travel puts them in conflict with assorted bounty hunters as well as Red Feather (Derek Hinkey), a Shoshone warrior protecting the Wolf clan. They also cross paths with the Mormon militia, a ruthless bunch who stage murderous attacks and make it look like the work of the Natives in the area.

Bloodbath

The instigation of the story is the real-life Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which these Mormon militia members killed more than 100 members of a wagon train traveling through Utah. Some of the “American Primeval” story follows two survivors of the attack, including Mormon husband and wife Jacob and Abish Pratt (Dane DeHaan and Saura Lightfoot).

The characters move through this unforgiving world of scalpings, knifings, gunshot wounds, and bloody surgery. But just how gory is “American Primeval?”

At one point, Bridger – usually a whimsical sort – slams a shovel down, sharp edge first, through a man’s foot. “Netflix’s Violent New Western Series Will Turn Your Stomach,” reads a headline in The Daily Beast.

I won’t try to sum up all the gore in “American Primeval,” because that would take more space than we have here. Let me say that I think a lot of the grisly reputation the series has picked up is based on the scalping of DeHaan’s character in the first episode. Fans of thrillers of all kinds are probably desensitized to throat-cuttings and the like. But scalpings, especially the bloody one that Jacob survives thanks to excruciating frontier surgery to reattach the top of his head, leave a deeper impression.

And there’s at least one other fairly brutal and bloody scene, usually a battle, in most of the episodes. If you’re inclined to cover your eyes when the hatcheting, knifing, and shooting starts, you’ll want to be on high alert through much of this six-episode run.

In the meantime, Netflix will hope to benefit from all the bloody word of mouth about “American Primeval.”

American Primeval is streaming on Netflix.

Keith Roysdon is a Tennessee-based writer of fiction, true crime, and pop culture.

This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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Previously Published on dailyyonder.com with Creative Commons License

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Photo credit: Preston Mota and Betty Gilpin in ‘American Primeval’ (2025) (Credit: Netflix via IMDb).