American Primeval (Netflix) portrays the Old West as such a hellhole that it makes Taylor Sheridan’s rugged Westerns (Yellowstone, 1883) look like an episode of Escape to the Country. It gives us the good,

Netflix's latest original paints a much grubbier picture of Western life than Taylor Sheridan's Dallas-esque saga.

Peter Berg directs an epic six-part drama about the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857, in which more than 100 settlers were murdered by militant Mormons.

However, it saps anything resembling wistfulness from its Hollywood Western roots, complicating its chances of cornering the post-Yellowstone market (alongside the latter's many spin-offs). What's left is the husk of a beloved genre,

American Primeval is awful, but largely in a way that’s terrifically entertaining. It’s about a lot of horrible people doing a great many heinous