Set during the Utah War of 1857, Peter Berg's limited series lays out a world where love conquers little, indifference is the only path to survival, and wanting anything will only bring death that much faster.

In the catalog of the modern western, a lot of space is given to stories focused on what is assumed to have been the sheer miserableness of life on the frontier. Viscous carpets of mud. Frigid snowscapes. Scalpings. Rapes. The sibilant impact of arrows puncturing flesh.

Creator Mark L. Smith's six-episode examination of scruffy, vicious people traversing the Utah Territory in 1857 also stars Taylor Kitsch and Dane DeHaan.

Peter Berg directs an epic six-part drama about the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857, in which more than 100 settlers were murdered by militant Mormons.

However, it saps anything resembling wistfulness from its Hollywood Western roots, complicating its chances of cornering the post-Yellowstone market (alongside the latter's many spin-offs). What's left is the husk of a beloved genre,

American Primeval is bleak. The way it ends and the warnings it maps out all come together in a violent spectacle that doesn't valorize the West. The post REVIEW: ‘American Primeval’ Is One Of Netflix’s Bleakest and Best Miniseries appeared first on But Why Tho?

Netflix‘s new limited series American Primeval gives a startling look at the American West in the mid-1800s, when Native Americans came to deadly blows with Mormon soldiers, pioneers looking for a new life,

American Primeval is awful, but largely in a way that’s terrifically entertaining. It’s about a lot of horrible people doing a great many heinous