"Yeah, I mean, we need it so much," Gilpin said, more sincerely. "We deserve it, as the viewers, to have one moment of romance and joy in this crazy world."

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.

Set during the Utah War of 1857, Peter Berg's limited series lays out a world where love conquers little, indifference is the only path to survival, and wanting anything will only bring death that much faster.

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.

Peter Berg directs an epic six-part drama about the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857, in which more than 100 settlers were murdered by militant Mormons.

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,