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.
Though “American Primeval” is largely fiction, Berg felt that he owed it to this actual, gory history to offer, in painstaking detail, as much realism as he could. “You get a little bit closer to some of the origin stories of how our country was formed,” Berg said of the series. “Those origin stories are very violent.”
The series was shot on location, in and around Santa Fe, N.M., in 2023, with a break of several months to accommodate the SAG-AFTRA actors’ strike. When I toured the set early that summer, I observed an exhaustive and sometimes exhausting commitment to realism. At a reservation near town, an exacting replica had been constructed of Fort Bridger, a trading outpost perched on a tributary of the Green River, in what today is southwest Wyoming. That set, the equivalent of eight city blocks, included an apothecary, a tannery, racks of drying fish and a trading goods store stocked with items that would have been available in 1857. Some were historical artifacts.
“Holding something that is literally from the past makes it easier to put yourself in that time period,” said Dudley Gardner, an archaeologist who consulted for the show.
By then, much of the fort had been burned, as the real fort was during the Utah War. Charred wood and ash mixed with mud underfoot. Nearby stood the skeletons of tepees, which were originally hung with elk and buffalo hide, dyed and stitched by Native artisans.
“One of the reasons why you don’t see this level of authenticity is because it’s very expensive,” Berg quipped, but he wasn’t exactly joking.
The show, written by Mark L. Smith (“The Revenant”), centers on Betty Gilpin’s Sara, a desperate woman who hires Taylor Kitsch’s Isaac, a guide raised by the Shoshone, to take her and her son West. In telling this story, Smith tried not to prettify what life was like in the territory.
“It’s important that we represent the world as it truly was — good, bad, indifferent, ugly,” he said. “Once you cheat that, it doesn’t land the same.”
That commitment to truth, even in the midst of fiction, extended to every department. The costume department built more than 1,300 garments and hundreds of pairs of moccasins. Artisans worked oil, powders, paints and dirt into the textiles to dye and age them. Berg told the artisans to take the age and dye further.
“It’s almost like we had to take it to a theatrical level,” Mila Hermanovski, a costume designer, said. “It takes the viewer there, to really feeling how these people are living. It feels oppressive, and it feels hard.” Complementing the costumes were grungy makeup and greasy hair, as well as inventive prosthetics to achieve the gorier moments.
When it came to the battle sequences, the sound designers researched the weaponry of the time, creating effects both vicious and accurate. Although a gunshot from a flintlock pistol lasts only an eye blink, the sound is composed of numerous elements: the squeeze of the trigger, the strike of the firing mechanism against the flint, the ignition of the powder, the slug’s passage through the barrel, the report, the impact.
On set in Santa Fe, the sound designer Wylie Stateman and his team made field recordings, paying particular attention to the wind. But there were times when authenticity ceded to tone. Berg told him that the sound had to feel tense, haunting.
“He wanted it dark,” Stateman said. “So we eliminated all birds. There are no birds in ‘American Primeval.’”
Particular attention was paid to the depiction of the Native American characters, whom the western genre has often reduced to cliché or violent stereotype. The producers hired Julie O’Keefe as an Indigenous cultural consultant. O’Keefe in turn hired others who could speak to the specific experiences and customs of the relevant tribes.
“The mistake is always made that one Native person knows every single answer to all 564 nations,” O’Keefe said. She made sure that the production had necessary access to experts in history, culture and language. One consultant suggested that the production should name a Shoshone leader Winter Bird and not Pine Leaf.
“It’s very important that directors, producers and writers see and hear us,” O’Keefe added.
Derek Hinkey, who plays Red Feather, a Shoshone warrior, is an enrolled member of the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribe. He appreciated this attention to detail, especially seeing so many Indigenous actors dressed in tribal regalia. “You walk up on set and it’s wild, man,” he said. “I grew up among my people. But to be in a different environment where they’re all in buckskin and we’re all together, it was unreal.”
That feeling of realism influenced the non-Native actors, too. “Being in 6,000 layers of petticoats and a corset sprinting through fields and vaulting onto horses gave a pretty quick sense of authenticity to both my hip flexors and consciousness,” Gilpin said. She added that the elements — freezing cold at night, extreme heat during a few days of desert shoots — did a lot of the acting for her.
While New Mexico offers dazzling scenery, the show mostly eschews it, preferring tight shots and close-ups. “I want the audience to feel like they’re in it with our characters,” Berg said. “‘Primeval’ is not glamorous. These folks are not in a position to sit back and enjoy the vistas. They are trying to stay alive.”
On the last evening of my visit, artificial snow decorated the ground and the trees. A filter on the camera lens leached any remaining color from the scene. Kitsch, in a buffalo hide coat, his face scarred and stained, lumbered into frame. A prop gun was checked and declared safe. Then the gun was fired and another character met a sudden end. The scene was ugly, unromantic.
“The violence is [expletive] relentless,” Kitsch said during a dinner break. “But it’s accurate.”
In Berg’s vision, that accuracy made it very American. “America was born through war and blood and death,” he said. “And that’s just reality. That’s just the way it seems to go with humans.”
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