Fashion
‘American Primeval’ Gets Its Hands Dirty
Set in 1857 amid the brutal Utah War, the Netflix series spares none of the grime and violence in its attempt to offer a fair and authentic retelling.
Howard Berger, the head of makeup on “American Primeval,” a Netflix limited series, thought he had achieved the optimal level of grime. He prepared a makeup test — muddied necks, blackened fingernails, dirt painted inside an actor’s ears — and showed it to Peter Berg, the series’s director.
Berg was unsatisfied. “‘More! More!’” Berger recalled him saying. “‘Come on, man. Cover him in dirt, like he hasn’t bathed in a year.’”
Berger did. “We went ahead and just kept making it more and more grungy,” Berger said.
For a long time, film and TV stories of the American West were aggressively whitewashed. Here the West is unwashed — muddy, bloody, cold and mean. In this way, “American Primeval,” a six-episode series that premieres on Jan. 9, joins recent films and series like “The English,” “Meek’s Cutoff,” “Power of the Dog” and “Killers of the Flower Moon” in repositioning the emphases and priorities of the western. Yet Berg (“Friday Night Lights,” “Painkiller,” “Lone Survivor”), a director who tends to both gravitate toward and challenge traditionally macho spaces, insists that the series, set in the Utah Territory in 1857, isn’t a western at all.
There are no saloons, no bordellos, no cowboys strutting up and down Main Streets, in part because there are no streets. The goal, which can be seen in nearly every begrimed frame, is an unusual, often brutal authenticity, stripped of nostalgia.
“American Primeval” is set amid the real-life clashes between the U.S. Army, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Shoshone, Southern Paiute and Ute tribes. (The series incorporates several real-life characters, including Brigham Young, the church president and a governor of Utah, played by Kim Coates of “Sons of Anarchy.”) Disagreements over sovereignty, religious exercise and territory came to a head in 1857, in a series of armed conflicts, including the Mountain Meadows Massacre, depicted, horrifically, in the series’s first episode, in which church members and Paiute auxiliaries killed about 120 Westbound pioneers.
