Six dark episodes of American prehistoric eraan expensive-looking western from Mark L. Smith, the screenwriter of the Oscar-winning film The revenant, are now sitting in the No. 1 TV spot on Netflix. This limited series unites for the fifth time Friday Night Lights‘ Peter Berg and Taylor Kitsch for a story about the struggle for control in present-day Utah and southern Wyoming just before the Civil War. Like many other previous and current entries in this genre, American prehistoric era is full of blood, weapons and death. The creators were aiming for a particularly dark aesthetic, so much so that the show’s sound designer mentioned in an interview with The New York Times about the project that Berg had instructed him to remove all bird sounds from the mix. In promoting the show, Netflix argues that the series has a lesson that sets it apart from entertainment programming in the American West. Namely: The American West was a mess.

“We have always shown ourselves to be… a very violent, territorial species,” is Berg’s philosophical insight, according to press materials shared by the streamer. “The focus is on exploring the inherent ability to become very violent American prehistoric era.” And in fact, everyone in the series is surrounded by murder, rape and abuse of all kinds. There’s a lot of history in this – perhaps too much – all loosely based on the events of the Utah War (or Mormon War) of 1857-58, a conflict between the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the federal government.

Betty Gilpin’s stern Victorian lady Sara is heading west, with her young son (Preston Mota) in tow. (A nice touch is that the son carries around a copy of Charles Dickens’ book.) David Copperfieldanother story about vulnerable people struggling to survive the average age of 19^Th Century.) Kitsch’s Isaac, a classic Natty Bumppo/Hugh Glass, raised among the Shoshone tribe and grieving alone in the bush after his wife and child were killed, reluctantly agrees to lead Sara across the Wasatch Mountains. The three are joined by a Shoshone girl (Shawnee Pourier) and are pursued by a bounty hunter (Jai Courtney) who is after Sara, dead or alive.

This small ad hoc family’s struggle across the landscape would probably be enough of a story for some. But American prehistoric era is full of people who want many things. We’re also given the task of Mormon émigré Jacob Pratt (Dane DeHaan) to find his wife Abish (Saura Lightfoot-Leon), who was separated from him through violence; the war of words that famous frontiersman Jim Bridger (a wryly funny Shea Wigham) wages with LDS leader Brigham Young (Kim Coates), who wants to purchase Bridger’s fort and trading post to protect Mormon sovereignty over the territory; the desperation of an idealistic U.S. Army captain (Lucas Neff) who tries but fails to keep the violence at bay; and the conflict between the warrior Red Feather (Derek Hinkey) and his mother, a Shoshone chief who only wants peace.

That’s a lot of storylines, and some may seem familiar to readers of many stories from the American West – Kevin Costner’s novel featured both a battered woman escaping punishment across the border and a younger warrior arguing with a peaceful tribal elder Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1For example. Some of the plot tricks – a white man is scalped but survives; A token (a pocket watch; a canteen with a spiral carved into it) travels through the landscape, telling a story when people can’t come directly from there The revenanta much tighter and (for my money) better story of a multifocal Western conflict set decades before the events of American prehistoric era. Bridger himself appears in both stories, initially as The revenantis the idealistic good guy played by Will Poulter who tries to help Leonardo DiCaprio’s beleaguered Hugh Glass Primevalas Whigham’s tough old hand who has seen it all.

Oddly enough, given the many individual moments of violence in the series, the Mountain Meadows Massacre, the fictional version of which sets in motion the main events of the plot and is responsible for many of the casualties that historians attribute to the Utah War, is compared to the historical one Recording weakened. In real life, the Baker-Fancher wagon train, consisting of about 40 individual families, mostly from Arkansas, bound for California, remained pinned down for five days after the start of the attack in September 1857 that led to the massacre, while their wagons were in She was defeated by a group of Mormon militiamen and Paiute people and suffered from shortages of water, food and ammunition. The massacre itself occurred on September 11, after a small group of Mormons approached the wagon train with a white flag and offered the emigrants safe passage from Native American attackers if they would leave their belongings behind in appeasement. The travelers accepted this offer and set off. Then their companions turned against them and killed them all, except for 17 children aged six, whose testimony, according to the attackers, could not be believed. These children were placed in Mormon homes and only reunited with their relatives several years later after the U.S. Army conducted a search for them.

This massacre and its aftermath would be a good topic for a longer treatment, but planning this project would be a delicate decision given the political situation in history, and besides, no one would want to see the result because it would be too terrible. (The 2007 film September morningwith Jon Voight, tried that but was terrible for various reasons while in the 2022 miniseries Under the banner of heaventhe massacre is a B-plot in the finale.) Berg and Smith try to solve the problem by toning down the violence of the massacre and spreading it across all storylines until it seems to be everywhere. In their version, the attack does not extend over several days of siege, but comes quickly and out of the blue, with an emigrant being killed by an arrow in the forehead in the middle of small talk. Yes, we see a lot of people die, and it’s intense – but because we’re following the point of view of Sara escaping, we don’t spend as much time on the scene itself. And we don’t get all those emigrant kids who are older than six years old, killed. (You actually see one die. The Mormon who kills the little boy immediately rips off his hood and vomits.) In the show, the Mormon attackers leave a group of women alive and hand them over as prisoners to their Indian collaborators ; Historically, no woman was allowed to escape violence.

In Netflix’s promotional materials, Smith offers some clues as to why the show softens the massacre: “We wanted to make sure we showed both sides of the attack as well. It was pushed by the Nauvoo Legion, effectively the Mormon militia, but we must understand that they perceived (the emigrants) as a threat.” To this end, Smith has Coates speak actual words to Brigham Young, drawn from historical records. Headlines about the horrific anti-Mormon violence that drove church members west float across the screen, and the script raises many negative encounters between Latter-day Saints and other white settlers, who denounce the Saints for polygamy and accuse them of murder threaten. Smith also adds to the Baker-Fancher bandwagon a small group of Mormon émigrés, including the Pratt couple, who are likeable, pointed characters, “good eggs” whose separation during the massacre and subsequent reunion story move much of the plot . (This creature American prehistoric erait doesn’t end well.)

There’s nothing wrong with mixing and recombining the story to enhance the drama. And it’s great to see religious conflict incorporated into a story about the American West. this story, also in other plot-heavy epics like Horizon: An American Sagatends to flatten out into a settler versus Indian scenario. But the cosmology of American prehistoric eraa relentless and (apart from a few lines from Jim Bridger) utterly humorless television series, it treats violence as a floating plague, a random affliction that afflicts each group in turn, an inevitable thing that cannot be controlled, rather than something infinitely variable Relationship to human agency. Television has its needs and Primeval You can’t blame him for trying to make his mark in a genre that’s increasingly just Taylor Sheridan shows. But I fear that “The West was violent” is not as new an idea as the creators of this series seem to think think.