You'll recognize quite a few faces The post ‘American Primeval’ Cast and Character Guide: Who’s Who in Netflix’s Western Miniseries? appeared first on TheWrap.

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.

The first reviews for Netflix's brutal Western are out, and the critic response thus far has been mixed, to say the least.

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.

The Western can be a deeply romantic genre with white hats and black hats, dusty streets and beautiful sunsets. Great films and TV series have broken with our rose-colored expectations of the American frontier,

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,