Set during the Utah War of 1857, Peter Berg's limited series lays out a world where love conquers little, indifference is the only path to survival, and wanting anything will only bring death that much faster.

Creator Mark L. Smith's six-episode examination of scruffy, vicious people traversing the Utah Territory in 1857 also stars Taylor Kitsch and Dane DeHaan.

In the catalog of the modern western, a lot of space is given to stories focused on what is assumed to have been the sheer miserableness of life on the frontier. Viscous carpets of mud. Frigid snowscapes. Scalpings. Rapes. The sibilant impact of arrows puncturing flesh.

Here are the faces you might recognize in Netflix's new miniseries western, "American Primeval," now streaming

A relentlessly violent six-part Western stars Betty Gilpin and Taylor Kitsch as travelers in the forbidding Utah territory of 1857, trying to survive amid massacres, mad wolves, and more.

Lights" creator Peter Berg makes the wild west look like hell on Earth in "American Primeval." There's some good between all the blood.

In Netflix’s new limited series, “American Primeval,” written by “The Revenant” scribe Mark. L. Smith, audiences are thrust into the viciousness of the American West, specifically the Utah Territory in 1857.

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,