While Brigham Young (Kim Coates) succeeds in burning down Jim Bridger’s (Shea Whigham) beloved fort, Bridger survives the fire. In real life, Jim Bridger would head east to plea his case to the U.S. Government against Young. Fort Bridger would be resurrected as a key U.S. military base of operations and Bridger wouldn’t die until 1881.

The first reviews for Netflix's brutal Western are out, and the critic response thus far has been mixed, to say the least.

Creator Mark L. Smith's six-episode examination of scruffy, vicious people traversing the Utah Territory in 1857 also stars Taylor Kitsch and Dane DeHaan.

In the catalog of the modern western, a lot of space is given to stories focused on what is assumed to have been the sheer miserableness of life on the frontier. Viscous carpets of mud. Frigid snowscapes. Scalpings. Rapes. The sibilant impact of arrows puncturing flesh.

While the story that unfolds on-screen took place in the 19th century Utah Territory – now Utah state – the show was filmed entirely in New Mexico, 600 miles to the south east.

The series, now streaming on Netflix, depicts the brutality with which the Mormons sought to create a new world for their beliefs, the pride with which the native people held onto their ancestral lands, and the tragedy of the people just seeking to make a new home in the chaos. But is any of it true?

The Western can be a deeply romantic genre with white hats and black hats, dusty streets and beautiful sunsets. Great films and TV series have broken with our rose-colored expectations of the American frontier,

In Netflix’s new limited series, “American Primeval,” written by “The Revenant” scribe Mark. L. Smith, audiences are thrust into the viciousness of the American West, specifically the Utah Territory in 1857.

However, it saps anything resembling wistfulness from its Hollywood Western roots, complicating its chances of cornering the post-Yellowstone market (alongside the latter's many spin-offs). What's left is the husk of a beloved genre,