An irritating yet enjoyable depiction of the Wild West

American Primeval should really be called Two Incredibly Annoying Women In The Wild West. Yes, the first title is more clickbaity, whetting the prurient viewer’s appetite for the savage, primitive violence that splatters over every other scene. But the second is more accurate. Not since Lily Dale in Trollope’s Chronicles of Barsetshire have I rooted so fervently for the protagonist to meet a sticky end as I have with this series’ two feisty heroines.

The Wild West depicted in American Primeval is grotesquely, mindlessly violent

One, Sara Rowell (Betty Gilpin), is a mother on the run from the law. There’s a bounty on her head because she killed someone (who probably, it is hinted, deserved it) and now — along with her crippled boy Devin (Preston Mota) — she’s seeking sanctuary in the remote mining camp where her long-lost husband has supposedly struck gold.

The other is Abish Pratt (Saura Lightfoot-Leon), a newly married Mormon wife who is so totally not into being a Mormon wife — the script doesn’t specify but I expect she wants to be an astronaut or run a worldwide Kundalini yoga franchise, or something — that you want to give her a good shake and go: “Well if you’re so strong-willed and feisty and independent, why did you do it then?”

Luckily, fate comes to Abish’s rescue. By a stroke of good fortune, almost her entire wagon train is massacred by the Mormon militia (pretending to be American Indians) — Utah Territory in 1857 is brutal — and the surviving women are left to be raped and killed by actual Indians. All the meek, compliant, wifely women — spoiler alert! — duly have their throats cut. But when Abish’s turn comes she assumes an expression of such feisty defiance that a handsome Indian warrior — much more handsome than her husband, natch — decides to spare her and keep her as his squaw.

Did you get the social message being rammed down your throat with the subtlety of a tomahawk? In the brutal patriarchy, only strong, spirited and, yes, feisty women are fit to survive; feminine ones not so much…

Up to a point this may be true. The Wild West depicted in American Primeval is so grotesquely, mindlessly violent that even the most rugged men rarely last more than a few seconds before being scalped or stabbed or shot in the stomach. But our two heroines push their feistiness to levels more apt to invite their own destruction than to protect them. The scene, for example, where Isaac (Taylor Kitsch), the grizzled frontiersman raised by Shoshone Indians, gives Sara strict instructions to stay hidden behind a rock while he goes into the hostile looking encampment of Texas Chainsaw Massacre inbred types to negotiate for some horses: why doesn’t the woman do as she’s told?

“Pull a stupid stunt like that again and I’ll kill you!,” grunts Isaac — or words to that effect — after yet another incident where Sara’s “I know better” meddling in a hostile realm she is completely unequipped to understand nearly gets them killed. The first couple of times it happens, you think: “Well, she is only a woman, I suppose.” By the third you’re shouting to Isaac, “Just do it!”

Abish isn’t much less irksome. Despite having completely lucked out — she has ended up with a tribal group of noble, sympathetic Indians where the squaws try to teach her Shoshone and where, instead of raping her, the males just cast coy, admiring glances at her — she keeps trying to escape and, when caught, shrieks like a professor of gender studies on an anti-Trump march.

Still, if you can get over the annoying women, American Primeval, written by Mark L. Smith (who did The Revenant) is an enjoyable watch, attractively shot by Peter Berg and with an adventure storyline that keeps you on the edge of your seat. I’d been worried, slightly, about the much-advertised violence, having found that my appetite for this sort of thing — see also sex — has diminished markedly as I’ve got older. But though there is indeed a lot of it, it’s handled with a degree of delicacy: plenty of killing but no gory “injury detail” as the statutory screen warnings like to phrase it.

Though I seriously doubt whether even 1850s Utah was anywhere near as lawless as depicted here (if it were, there would have been no one left alive), it is loosely based on historical fact. There really was an incident — the Mountain Meadows Massacre — when, in a five-day battle, Mormon militiamen wiped out around 140 emigrants en route to California. Brigham Young (Kim Coates) appears as a messianic baddie, which may not endear the show to viewers in Salt Lake City. I had a Mormon assistant once: one of the nicest, most hardworking, God-fearing people I ever knew. How disturbing to realize that all that time he may have been secretly plotting to massacre me.