Series focuses on brutality of the Old West

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.

The eye-catching Netflix miniseries “American Primeval” contains that in its six episodes, including a particular fetish for bloody animal carcasses, which are hung, skinned, drained and boiled with regularity. The odors are unimaginable.

Mark L. Smith, who created and wrote “American Primeval,” has an affinity for the Western as a bad dream. But it’s as if Smith’s fascination with the endurance shown by those who took on the Old West leads him to create endurance tests for his audiences.

The series is loosely based on the Utah War of 1857-58, when settlers belonging to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints formed militias and took up arms, gingerly, against the United States.

Historical figures like frontier entrepreneur Jim Bridger (Shea Whigham) and Latter-day Saints leader Brigham Young (Kim Coates) have large roles.

It’s a period when settlers, displaced tribes and the U.S. Army skirmished for land and authority in the recently established Utah Territory. And Smith wants to use it as a stage for something sprawling and meaningful — the latest pronouncement on how savage the supposedly civilized become when the chips are down.

An Army captain played by Lucas Neff supplies the mandatory poetic narration: “I have come to believe that these lands possess forces that we civilized are not able to defend against.”

Director Peter Berg manages the gunfights and trail rides proficiently, and cinematographer Jacques Jouffret (“Into the Wild”) provides a washed-out, blue-gray look that is handsome if not particularly distinctive for this kind of story.

But after some vivid early scenes when a mother and son, Sara and Devin Rowell (Betty Gilpin and Preston Mota), ride into the harrowing squalor of Bridger’s outpost seeking a guide to take them farther west, there’s not enough excitement in the ideas, and there’s not enough thought in the storytelling.

What’s left is the sometimes orgiastic brutality — no different from the violence in the kind of low-rent entertainment “American Primeval” wants to separate itself from — and the manifold formulas of the Western.

With the exception of Whigham’s puckish, entertaining Bridger, the trappers, soldiers, bounty hunters and militiamen feel like extras from a Sam Peckinpah film. The Shoshone and Paiute characters, meanwhile, are solemnly noble or dangerously impassioned but invariably humorless.

The clichés compound as the Rowells head into the mountains with a reluctant guide, Isaac Reed (Taylor Kitsch) and a runaway Native American girl, Two Moons (Shawnee Pourier).

Isaac is a strong-and-silent caricature, too hollow to give Kitsch very much to communicate. It doesn’t help that the story is overstuffed and overcomplicated, circling back and forth from the fugitives’ flight to the jockeyings of the settlers and the Army to the plight of the Shoshone.

A tighter focus on either the relationship between Sara and Isaac or on the Utah War might have allowed for a more coherent emotional and thematic arc,. As it is, Smith juices the story in the later episodes by breaking with the historical record in ways that may bemuse the average viewer but likely will displease any Latter-day Saints who have made it that far.