The 19th-century American West of American Primeval is a land of unyielding brutality, though nothing about this six-part Netflix series, premiering Jan. 9, is as violent as Peter Berg’s belligerently over-the-top direction.

The series, now streaming on Netflix, depicts the brutality with which the Mormons sought to create a new world for their beliefs, the pride with which the native people held onto their ancestral lands, and the tragedy of the people just seeking to make a new home in the chaos. But is any of it true?

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,

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

Netflix's limited series starring Betty Gilpin and Taylor Kitsch plays out against the background of the so-called Utah War.

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.

Do any of the characters in American Primeval survive? Here’s everything you need to know about how Netflix’s American Primeval ends… Finding it impossible to get through Netflix’s American Primeval without knowing what happens to our heroes?