The trailer for Netflix’s ultraviolent series “American Primeval” promises to show “America like never before.” But as fans of frontier stories know, there’s really nothing new under the Western sun.
The series, which premiered on Thursday, is more viscerally brutal than “Deadwood,” “Godless,” “Yellowstone” or any other recent TV western, averaging multiple murders and gaping wounds in every episode. Set amid the Utah War of 1857-58, it depicts four groups of people — Native Americans, white pioneers, the U.S. Army and Brigham Young’s followers among the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — who are all desperate to survive. They are also at each other’s throats, willing to do just about anything in order to see another day.
The action is put in motion by a real-life (and really bloody) event: the Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which church militia members slaughtered some 120 members of an emigrant wagon train. Characters slogging through the aftermath include a non-militia husband and wife from the church (Dane DeHaan and Saura Lightfoot-Leon); a fugitive from the law and her son (Betty Gilpin and Preston Mota); the grizzled white man guiding them through the chaos (Taylor Kitsch); a Shoshone warrior who lives for vengeance (Derek Hinkey); and a bounty hunter who seems to kill as much for pleasure as for profit (Jai Courtney).
They’re not a bunch you would want to turn your back on. They do, however, have precedents in film, television, literature and the history on which the series is based.
“American Primeval” is best seen as an apotheosis of extreme westerns past, works eager to push beyond sanitized frontier myths to show the carnage that was never far from everyday life in the West. Below is a brief guide to those stories, a sort of primer to “Primeval,” or a supplementary list of what to read and watch before, during or after viewing the show. Some tell similar stories. Others hit on similar themes. Approach them all with caution.
Book / TV Series
‘Under the Banner of Heaven’
Both the nonfiction book by Jon Krakauer (2003) and the limited FX drama (2022) tell the true story of Ron and Dan Lafferty, fundamentalist Latter-day Saints who, claiming to have acted on God’s instructions, murdered their brother Allan’s wife, Brenda Lafferty, and her 15-month-old daughter, Erica, in 1984. But “Banner” also includes accounts of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, providing valuable cultural and historical context for “American Primeval.” Eager to claim a church homeland, Young, who was then the governor of Utah Territory, declared martial law in response to U.S. military activity in the area. The ensuing attack by the church militia, executed with help from Southern Paiutes, is depicted in Episode 1 of “Primeval” with ax-swinging, blood-gushing ferocity that sets the tone for all that follows. It is a statement of intent: This will get nasty.
Book
‘The Madstone’
Set on the terrifying terrain of post-Civil War Texas, this 2023 novel by Elizabeth Crook presents a young woman with traits and circumstances very similar to those of Sara Rowell (Gilpin) in “Primeval.” Each woman is on the run with her young son. Like Sara, Nell in “The Madstone” accepts help from a resourceful man who falls in love with her combination of pluck and tenderness. Nell’s protector, the 19-year-old Benjamin, is much gentler than Kitsch’s John Wick-like Isaac. But he is equally smitten and just as determined to deliver his fugitive to safety. Crook is a treasure of Texas letters whose voice recalls the likes of Charles Portis and Mark Twain. Although that voice belongs here to her first-person narrator, Benjamin, it is her heroine’s desperate travels that set everything in motion.
“American Primeval” is, among other things, a captivity narrative. “Primeval” doesn’t depict or imply any miscegenation, as “The Searchers” does; in that 1956 movie, directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne, for a white woman to have sexual relations with an Indigenous man was considered a fate worse than death. If anything, “Primeval” is a corrective of sorts to Ford’s canonized film, which, depending on how you look at it, is either a movie about racism or a racist movie. When Wayne’s Ethan Edwards finally tracks down his niece, Debbie (Natalie Wood), and frees her from her Comanche captors, you’re not sure if he’ll take her home or kill her. Primeval indeed.
Book / Movie
‘The Revenant’
“American Primeval” was written by Mark L. Smith, who also co-adapted Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s 2015 cinematic adaptation of the 2002 epic by Michael Punke. But you can spot the through lines without looking at the credits. These are harsh, cold, unforgiving environments — “The Revenant” is set in 1820s Montana and South Dakota — in which everyone seems to be trying to track and kill everyone else. Both stories are unusually accurate in their sense of hostile inclusion, with French pioneers, Native tribes and white Americans in a state of perpetual antagonism. And both versions take care to depict the ways and customs of those tribes (in “Primeval,” mostly the Shoshone people; in “The Revenant,” mostly the Arikara and Pawnee). In these worlds, the West is something to survive, not conquer.
TV Series
‘Deadwood’
Honey, we blew up the Western. Without this poetically profane HBO series (2004-6) and big-screen follow-up (2019), it’s hard to imagine “Primeval” or any of the other grimy revisionist TV Westerns of recent years — Shea Whigham’s bare-knuckle capitalist fort owner, Jim Bridger, in “Primeval” could be a cousin of Ian McShane’s pragmatically ruthless Al Swearengen. And yet, compared to “Primeval,“ “Deadwood,” created by David Milch and set in 1870s South Dakota, is almost gentle. (The film, also written by Milch, was directed by Daniel Minahan.) Yes, Swearengen has his crew feed fresh corpses to Mr. Wu’s wild hogs. Yes, you’d best be packing heat to walk these dirt roads at night. But Milch and company apply a sense of humor, thanks largely to the F-bombs and C-words, that stands in stark contrast to the self-seriousness of “Primeval.”
Books
Richard Slotkin’s series on the American West
For many years, Richard Slotkin’s dense but highly rewarding nonfiction trilogy on the mythology of the American West (“Regeneration Through Violence,” 1973; “The Fatal Environment,” 1985; “Gunfighter Nation,” 1992) stood on its own. Then he added a fourth installment, “A Great Disorder,” in 2024. As a whole, these books take apart the heroic myths that “American Primeval” critiques with its blunt-force violence — even as the show indulges in some of those myths. (For instance, Kitsch’s Isaac Reed, who is raised by members of the Shoshone tribe, can be seen as a descendant of Natty Bumppo, the hero of James Fenimore Cooper’s 19th-century Leatherstocking Tales and an archetype of what Slotkin calls the “man who knows Indians.”) Whereas entertainments ranging from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show to classic Hollywood westerns specialized in simplifying and cleaning up the brutality of frontier existence, “American Primeval” wants you to soak in the chaos and suffering.
