2024 was one of the best years in memory for the Western genre. There were excellent and accurate Westerns like The Dead Don’t Hurt, The Settlers, and The Thicket, expensive, bloated epics like Horizon: An American Saga, fun genre-benders like The Last Stop at Yuma County and Place of Bones, and interesting true stories like End of the Rope and The Night They Came Home. It seems like the trend is continuing, with the first great series of 2025 being a barn-storming historical Western with unforgettable performances. American Primeval is a phenomenal Netflix series with enough action, intrigue, history, and artistry to please nearly everybody.
Feeling like a mix between The Searchers, Deadwood, A Fistful of Dollars, and The Revenant (which was also written by Mark L. Smith), American Primeval has a large cast spread out across multiple storylines that all intersect in fascinating ways. Jacques Jouffret’s cinematography oscillates between brutal intimacy with the series’ characters and staggeringly beautiful compositions of nature, which iterates one of the show’s main themes — how violence and civilization are connected. People say January is the throw-away month of the year, where films and television go to die, but American Primeval will surely remain one of the best shows of 2025.
The Dangerous West of Utah’s Frontier, 1857
A mother and son fleeing from their past form a found family while confronting a harsh landscape of freedom and cruelty in the American West.
- Release Date
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January 9, 2025
- Network
-
Netflix
- Cast
-
Taylor Kitsch
, Jai Courtney
, Dane DeHaan
, Betty Gilpin
, Nick Hargrove
, Kyle Bradley Davis
, Derek Hinkey
, Saura Lightfoot Leon
, Preston Mota
, Shawnee Pourier
, Joe Tippett - Seasons
-
1
- A brilliantly constructed narrative that connects various members of the great ensemble to tell a distinctly American story.
- Surprising and vicious action that’s filmed and choreographed with precision.
- Taylor Kitsch, Betty Gilpin, and Kim Coates are specifically excellent in unforgettable roles.
- A fascinating study of the intersections between religion, civilization, culture, and morality.
American Primeval begins with a simple quest — Sara Rowell (the inimitable Betty Gilpin) and her son Devin (Preston Mota) are traveling through the turbulent frontier to reconnect with her husband. Her first guide is murdered, and the next one, an enigmatic loner named Isaac (Taylor Kitsch), turns down her offer at first.
Sara and Devin eventually team up with a caravan of Mormons headed to Utah, a territory which the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints (LDS) has taken over under the leadership of Brigham Young (a terrific Kim Coates). Unbeknownst to them, a mute young Indigenous girl named Two Moons (Shawnee Pourier) has snuck into their wagon, running away after killing her sexually predatory father.
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The choice to ride with the Mormons will catch Sara and Devin in a vast web of death, lies, and politics. It’s 1857, and tensions are rising between the rebellious Mormons (seeking territorial autonomy) and the American government, leading to the Utah War. Unfortunately, Sara and Devin joined the wagon train headed to a temporary settlement that would become the location of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. American Primeval follows the few people who survive this awful incident (filmed with visceral gusto) — Sara, Devin, and Two Moons; Jacob Pratt (Dane DeHaan) and his soon-to-be-captured wife, Abish (Saura Lightfoot-Leon); and Isaac, who sees it all and helps Sara, Devin, and Two Moons escape.
The Silent Taylor Kitsch and the Suspicious Betty Gilpin
Kitsch is honestly badass in the kind of role we’ve seen before (a solitary man of few words, with a mysterious past, incredible fighting skills, and surprising connections), but he brings a ton of soul and anger (and eventually vulnerability) to the role of Isaac. His journey with Sara and Devin makes up some of the most thrilling parts of American Primeval, taking them through snowy forests, hidden caves, vast plains, and Native American villages. Every action scene he’s in is fantastic.
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Betty Gilpin matches his intensity with a sly, emotional performance of great gravity. Sara, too, has a mysterious past, one which quickly compromises and threatens Isaac’s life, binding them together. Gilpin does fierce physical work here, and manifests the very kind of desperation for survival that American Primeval captures so well. In a sense, she is civilization personified, with a sophisticated artifice and a logical pursuit of safety and comfort, but morally compromised and building her life upon violence.
The Conflict Between Religion and Civilization Paints the Snow Red with Blood
Elsewhere in American Primeval, we follow the perpetrators of the massacre — a group of violent Mormons (and some Indigenous people they hired to help them). See, a decade prior in Illinois, the LDS church faced a major crisis after their founder, Joseph Smith, was accused of perjury and polygamy. He declared martial law and ordered the Mormon militia (the Nauvoo Legion) to ‘keep the peace,’ which resulted in the State of Illinois arresting Smith on charges of treason. Smith was then killed by an angry mob of people who were sick of living among Mormons.
And so, after a schism in the church, new leader Brigham Young led the Mormons to Utah to establish their own little Eden. Their demand for complete autonomy and refusal to accept federal laws led to a rift between them and the American government, and fears of persecution led to the Nauvoo Legion exterminating many settlers, soldiers, and others who crossed their land. This very specific historical moment (and what it says about faith, morality, and civilization) helps make American Primeval stand out from similar gritty Westerns.
In American Primeval, Brigham Young is brilliantly portrayed by Kim Coates as an intimidating paranoiac who preaches peace but quietly works with his militia to eliminate any perceived threats. The wagon trail that Sara and Devin were part of enters the Mormons’ crosshairs as a result, and the Nauvoo Legion stages the massacre to look like it was perpetrated by Native Americans.
Joe Tippett is fantastic as James Wolsey, a Mormon man leading a militia of others who absolutely don’t share Christ’s message of peace and turning the other cheek. He’s caught in a difficult situation. Brigham Young realizes that there are survivors from their massacre and tasks Joe with hunting them down and taking them out so that nothing traces back to the Mormons. Unfortunately, two of the survivors were Mormons themselves. Dane DeHaan gives a painful performance as a devout Mormon who survives a scalping without realizing that the LDS church was responsible. His journey with James Wolsey and the Nauvoo Legion to try and find his wife is fraught with tension and uncertainty.
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Incredibly Intense & Immersive Action Filmmaking
Another thing which distinguishes American Primeval from other Westerns is its dynamic camerawork and direction. Peter Berg directs every episode, and it’s probably his best work to date. Berg is known for his big (and basic) action dramas, but he’s usually very focused on the dramatic arc of a main character. For his past five films, that main character has been played by Mark Wahlberg, but Hancock is another great example.
In American Primeval, he’s taken the scope and production value of those films and filtered them through the aesthetically diverse and emotionally captivating approach he’s taken to directing television (The Leftovers, Friday Night Lights). The result is something that’s accessible to the mainstream but frequently surprising in its boldness and vision.
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Berg is aided by his previous collaborators, the great post-rock band Explosions in the Sky, who provide a thrilling score. Director of photography Jacques Jouffret (another previous Berg collaborator) works in tandem with the score and direction, creating unforgettable shots through bizarre angles and framing. With editors Hugo Diaz, Jon Otazua, Art Jones, and Jeffrey M. Werner, Jouffret constructs incredible action sequences that feel like 360-degree immersions into chaos. It’s even better whenever Kitsch is involved.
Don’t Believe the Cynics: This Is a Unique Western Experience
While some will groan that we’ve seen all this before, pointing to Deadwood, The Proposition, The Nightingale, and other Westerns, American Primeval really is different if you consider the elements of its narrative. The series explores notions of autonomy (for a woman, a church, a tribe), locating the inherent violence of that autonomy and how it intersects and clashes with civilization, the family unit, state and federal governments, and organized religion. All of these things are formative aspects of the transition between the Wild West and modern America, bifurcated by the Civil War, which looms on the horizon of American Primeval like a foreboding omen.
Ferocious entertainment on the surface but deep to dig into, the series is great evidence for why Westerns remain popular and vital to our cultural history. American Primeval begins streaming on Netflix today, Jan. 9, 2025. Watch it through the link below:
Watch American Primeval
