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 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,

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.

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.

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.

This is a project that will rise and fall on the strength of its action, adventure, thriller, suspense, and survival sequences.