Ive watched Godless and American Primeval — one BBC | UK News

When it comes to TV western sequence, three from latest years stand above the remainder. The most latest of them is American Primeval, launched on Netflix earlier this yr. It is a brutally lifelike and violent depiction of life in the untamed frontier of Utah, focusing on a mom and her baby attempting to survive.

On their journey, they encounter settlers who observe their own guidelines, Native Americans defending their lands and the Mormon militia led by Brigham Young. The relentless violence is a stark distinction to the sanitised variations of the Wild West portrayed in Nineteen Nineties movies like Tombstone and Dances With Wolves.

But it isn’t all about pushing violence as far as it will possibly go. It boasts glorious performances from the solid and a storyline centered around the Mountain Meadows Massacre, a horrifying and disgraceful event in the historical past of the West that was possible unknown to many before this sequence.

Viewers have praised the show as “absolutely phenomenal” and “raw and unflinching”, while Empire magazine described it as “a raw, bloody odyssey that will pierce your skull like a hatchet flung face-first”, including: “Nostalgia has been stripped away completely, scalped in favour of a grimy, far more authentic journey that takes us back to how the so-called land of the free really came to be.”

The Guardian was less impressed, calling it a “samey western that’s far less clever than it thinks it is”. I strongly disagree with that evaluation.

If American Primeval had you on the sting of your seat, there’s another Western miniseries many viewers declare is even better. Godless was launched on Netflix in 2017. Like American Primeval, it is set in the Old West and is “uber-violent” in components. In other methods, though, it is fairly different to the newer release.

Godless is a basic revenge story – with a twist. Crime boss Frank Griffin (performed by Jeff Daniels) and his gang of outlaws are searching Roy Goode, a former protege who betrayed them. While fleeing his previous mentor, Roy finds himself in a distant New Mexico mining city where virtually all of the inhabitants are girls. Roy’s presence attracts Griffin’s murderous gang to the city, where the residents are compelled to stand resolute and defend themselves.

Critics praised it as a “work of confident artistry”, a “clandestinely old-fashioned mash-up of all the great Westerns you ever knew and loved” and “unrelentingly brilliant” and it received three Primetime Emmy Awards..

As high profile as both American Primeval and Godless had been, there’s a third fashionable western TV sequence that is better than them both. The English, made by the BBC, went a little under the radar when it was launched in 2022. Starring Emily Blunt, Chaske Spencer and Rafe Spall, it’s set in 1890 and follows Lady Cornelia Locke (Blunt) who has travelled from England to the American west to search revenge on the person she blames for the death of her son.

While it matches both American Primeval and Godless for bleakness, it also introduces another horrifying facet of life in the nineteenth century that not often makes TV or cinema screens: syphilis and its ugly impact on the human physique. And it options one of the most terrifying characters of latest instances, Black-Eyed Mog, the bonnet-wearing, bespectacled Welsh matriarch of a violent household which guidelines over the sun-baked plains from their armed compound.

Critcs gave it 5 stars, saying it has a script “as gorgeous as the landscape”, which “evokes the pitilessness of the old west” and questions “how many of us would remain sane, and morally sound, in a lawless land where – for hundreds of miles at a time – no one could hear you, or anyone who got in your way, scream”.