American Primeval is taking an open-world video game approach to its brand of revisionist Western. As our characters wander around, they encounter all kinds: friendly Mormons and murderous ones, friendly indigenous people and murderous ones, friendly settlers and murderous ones. You just never quite know which one is which when you stumble into them, until the shooting starts.
This approach can be a little, well, video-gamey. As a horror guy, I was certainly tickled when a blind cackling hillbilly witch showed up to lure our heroes into Consanguinity Corner, but you can only take a show that otherwise self-evidently prides itself on gritty realism when Leatherface and Grandpa from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre show up.
Yet at the end of the episode, Captain Dellinger writes a lovely and heartfelt letter or journal entry in which he laments the way he feels he’s losing his essential character in the ceaselessly violent world he’s entered. “Hatred” and “brutality” are everywhere, driving out “compassion and basic tenderness.”
“I am overcome at this time by a deep pain from a tremendous and always present lack of love,” he writes. “So few in these lands know of grace. There is only brutality here.” He’s painting things with an awfully broad brush, as the concurrent shots of Abish being treated with care and kindness by the Shoshone women demonstrate. But he’s not wrong overall. American Primeval may have a kind of shopworn way of showing it, but it really is exhausting to think about how many people in this land of ours like it better when they know others are suffering.
I reviewed episode three of American Primeval for Decider.
Tags: american primeval, decider, TV, TV reviews