Howard Berger, the head of makeup on American Primeval, thought he had achieved the optimal level of grime...Berg was unsatisfied. More! More!...Cover him in dirt, like he hasn't bathed in a year.' Berger did...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...in repositioning the emphases and priorities of the western.
Berg, 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.
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