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How the directors of new the Western TV show 'American Primeval' try to make it more realistic

Taylor Kitsch and Betty Gilpin in “American Primeval.”
Netflix
Taylor Kitsch and Betty Gilpin in “American Primeval”

Westerns are everywhere right now. From the massive hit that is "Yellowstone" and its rather romanticized vision of Western lore, to a new limited series that takes a decisively different approach: "American Primeval." 

Set in 1857 during the Utah War, the show strips the romance from the Wild West. The characters are covered in grime, the film is stripped of color, the story is as grim as history actually was — or at least that’s the approach the filmmakers have said they tried to take.

Rebecca Onion, a senior editor at Slate, says, they did it with some successes and some failures, and that our cultural obsession with the call of the West right now has a lot to do with our current politics. Onion has written about "Yellowstone" and "American Primeval," and joined The Show to talk about it.

Full conversation

REBECCA ONION: I think that stripping the romance from things in the American West is like another way of creating lore, in my opinion, which I think it succeeds at pretty well, and reading the way that the people who made the show expressed themselves about the show. They were very excited about the idea that this would be something honest that hadn't been represented before, but I'm not sure that's possible. Now I will say that I felt very grim watching this show the entire time. I don't know about you, but I definitely did whereas, for example, if you watch the Yellowstone prequels, which are probably the most direct comparison in terms of the timing that they're set in, 1883 for example. There are love stories that carry you along a little bit. There's a strong family relationship. But in “American Primeval,” there is this little family that Peter Bergen, Mark L. Smith, who made the show, are trying to sort of set up. And there are ways that your heart can, at least for me, there were moments where I was like, “Oh, OK. Maybe these people are actually helping each other, they're collaborating.” …

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah.

ONION: … “They're getting past obstacles. They're trying to succeed at something.” But as soon as that gets built up for you, it kind of gets ripped away in a way that I will not spoil.

GILGER: Yes, don’t spoil. So it's like the storyline is grim, right? There's a lack of characters that you're rooting for, right? Which happens in a lot of shows today. But there's also this really stripped of color and dirty and muddy and gross reality that they're trying to show here. describe that for us, for people who haven't seen this, they're trying to be very realistic in a very grim way.

ONION: I read a New York Times piece about the making of “American Primeval.” One of the sound designers was quoted saying that Peter Berg had him strip out all of the bird song from the sound.

GILGER: Yeah.

ONION: Which I was so struck by. The look of the show has that blue-gray, stripped out tone to it, which I know they do on purpose to try to make it look less beautiful. I mean, the American West is beautiful. And, I watched “The Revenant” right before I wrote about “American Primeval,” because Mark L. Smith, who wrote “American Primeval,” wrote “The Revenant.” And so from 2015 obviously. And I had not seen it before, and I was so blown away by how beautiful it looked.That is a grim story, too. Leonardo DiCaprio, his character, gets mauled by a bear and betrayed by everybody who's supposed to be collaborating with him, almost everybody, but the way that the visuals are, you know, you see the green of the trees against the white of the snow, right? And that's not the way it is in “American Primeval.” You don't get the joy of the landscape.

GILGER: Right, which does something to the audience as you're watching it right? You have a visceral reaction to that, but it's not, as you're saying, the first Western in recent years that has really tried to show the West as it, quote, unquote, truly was, right? I'm thinking of Martin Scorsese's “Killers of the Flower Moon,” which did this as well. For me, what do you think is happening in American culture? Not just that we're obsessed with Westerns right now, which we are, but there seems to be this real pull to see the West in this reality that is not flowery, not romantic in any way.

ONION: This is a very cynical take I'm about to put forth. In a way, I wonder if it's partly that Hollywood has returned to intellectual property quite a bit over the past 20 years.

GILGER: Yeah.

ONION: It's the reason why there are so many Marvel movies. It's the reason why there are so many reboots and remakes instead of new properties. And when it comes to historical fiction, those of us who like to consume historical fiction, of which I count myself among the number, will see that there are certain phases and times that writers and movie makers return to, quite a bit. And the American West is a great one. People sort of know the outline of the idea, so you can frame a story within the players, the characters that you're going to see there, the conflicts, the strife. People have a sense of what happened, and then you can subvert it in different ways by making it funny, like the the HBO show “Dead Wood,” which I absolutely loved, or you could do a twist, like the contemporary “Yellowstone,” the Taylor Sheridan show, which is set in contemporary times, but it's still working with the iconography of the cowboy. And I also think that in a way, it works for us, because the West has a lot of stories of dispossession, and like feeling like you had something and you're losing it, or you came here to have it and now you're about to lose it. So I think a lot of people are thinking about a lot in the United States right now.

GILGER: That brings me to my final question, which is what you're starting to get at there, which is that all pop culture kind of reflects the moment that it's being made in, not just the moment that it's being made about, right? Why do you think we want to watch these shows right now, whether it's a romantic version like “Yellowstone,” or whether it's this really not romantic version in a show like “American Primeval?” Is this about tapping into something that we are hungry for right now in our culture?

ONION: In politics, there's a huge fight over how American history is going to be remembered and re-represented, to kids in school, to college students in colleges, in monuments, in fictions also. So I find watching “Yellowstone” absolutely fascinating in that respect, because I know that it is enjoyed by people across the political spectrum, in a way that a lot of other television shows, I don't think are. And the way that that show gives everybody a little bit of something. It gives people who are sort of anti liberal and, annoyed at what they perceive as sort of overly cosmopolitan urban people, it gives them a feeling of satisfaction, but it also because it's about cowboys and how great they are. But, you don't have to be conservative or leaning on that side of things to enjoy these storylines that are about how families have conflict over generations and over time, they evolve a different way of living with each other, or storylines that are just about action, like there's action in them, which is fun to watch.

GILGER: Yeah.

ONION: And even for people who consider themselves peace loving, I think that there's a way that everyone across the political spectrum in the U.S. can find something in those stories that's for them,

GILGER: Which is rare, right now, right?

ONION: Increasingly, yeah, increasingly, in a way that you can't necessarily do as much with a story about Vietnam, a story about the Iraq War. It's hard to make fictions that contain within themselves all sides of the story, but people who make stories about the American West really love to try to do that, and sometimes they succeed.

GILGER: Sometimes they succeed. All right, we will leave it there for now. Rebecca Onion, senior editor with slate joining us to talk about this. Rebecca, thank you so much for your perspective here. I appreciate it. 

ONION: Oh, yeah, no problem.

KJZZ's The Show transcripts are created on deadline. This text is edited for length and clarity, and may not be in its final form. The authoritative record of KJZZ's programming is the audio record.

Lauren Gilger, host of KJZZ's The Show, is an award-winning journalist whose work has impacted communities large and small, exposing injustices and giving a voice to the voiceless and marginalized.
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