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.
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