If the Netflix series American Primeval were a song, it would be played in a minor key, one and the same chord. Three half steps below everything that musically sounds like comfort and characterised by a monotonous simplicity. The song itself would be called "Misery" and performed on a warped recorder by a man whose bodily hygiene could best be described as questionable.
Peter Berg and The Revenant screenwriter Mark Smith offer the same thing here, with no breathing space, nuance, variety or flashes of light. In six long episodes, we get a glimpse into the grimmest of lives during the darkest years of American history, and I love it. Is American Primeval a little too bleak? Yes, it is. Is American Primeval a little too dark tonally? Yes, it is. Is it monotonous in its storytelling with characters who are all genuinely awful? Yes, it is. But in this case, it doesn't matter. In fact, I think I prefer it this way. If Deadwood and The Revenant had a child, it would be named American Primeval.
The year is 1857. It's three years before Abraham Lincoln is elected President of the United States and four years before the Civil War breaks out. We follow a mother, Sara Rowell, and her lowly son, Devin, who intend to travel several hundred miles to Wisconsin to meet up with her husband, who has been working at a mine for several years and, according to legend, has become filthy rich in the process. The promise of a better life for herself and her son drives her to make the dangerous journey through a chaotic America, and to escape bandits and natives she joins the scarred half-native and defeated man Isaac, who quickly turns out to be as rough as they come but with a knack for killing people.
American Primeval, like The Revenant, is a filthy, miserable, hard, and dark cross-section of American history, mixing relatively shallow character portraits with excruciating amounts of excessive violence in a way that I realise some will call "numbing" or "brain-dead". However, I am not one of these. I appreciate this more historically accurate picture of 19th-century America than the brightly lit and elegant one we've been fed in everything from Silverado to Tombstone over the years, even if Mark Smith and Peter Berg certainly partly exaggerate the concentrated misery of life in this period.
The war between settlers and natives rages, as does the war between culture and religion, and for those who don't choose sides, life as an outlaw in a time when food, medicine, and law and order were in acute short supply. Taylor Kitsch is taut, quietly tormented, but deadly capable as Isaac and Betty Gilpin is strong but vulnerable as Sara in a miniseries I really enjoyed. A little more nuanced storytelling with less claustrophobic imagery wouldn't have hurt, but overall this feels like The Revenant in TV series form and I, for one, don't plan to turn that offer down.